Renovating Our Hearts

Naively, I thought the transition from a religiously diverse marketplace job as an electrical engineer to an executive director of a nonprofit in a solely Christian context would be easy-peasy. Wrong! Thank God for my Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) pastor-friend, Bill, who helped me with that transition and more. Bill was not only my pastor-friend, but he was my dear mentor. During our frequent lunch meetings at a burger joint, I could count on Pastor Bill to say, “Luke, my brother, it’s about cardiology.” Pastor Bill was not talking about that crucial organ that pumps blood and oxygen around the body; rather, he was talking metaphorically about our hearts—that immaterial part of us that is the seat of our affections and our will. Our actions—for good or for ill—are prompted and guided by our wills, by our hearts. We all must give rapt attention to and render relentless tender loving care of our hearts. In other words, we all have inner work to do.

The Condition of Our Hearts: The Reality

The condition of our hearts really matters. Consider Jeremiah 17:9. In this passage, and the broader literary context (Jer 16:19-17:11), Jeremiah preaches about the locus and reality of human sin. He laments the “heart is devious above all else; it is perverse” (NRSV). Because of the historic Fall of humanity event, our hearts—the locus of human sin—are desperately sick. Consequently, we are an amalgam of good and evil; like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we all have split personalities. We are glorious ruins as the late apologist Dr. Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying. Like the Apostle Paul, we desire to do good, but we do evil instead (Romans 7). In our post-Genesis 3 reality, St. Augustine correctly diagnosed our condition as those with “disordered loves.” We do not love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength. Additionally, we do not love our neighbors as ourselves.

The condition of our hearts matter because our true selves and character reside in our hearts. Our vices live snuggly hidden in our hearts and manifest themselves outwardly through our actions. Consider Mark 7:21-23. Jesus, responding to the Pharisees, says, “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come—fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (NRSV).

Truly we must give attention to our hearts because of its ugly and unwelcomed residents—evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. To borrow and adapt an old Ford Motor Company jingle, renovation of our hearts is “Job #1,” if we are to evict these unsavory and unwanted residents.

The Prophet Jeremiah follows the declaration that our heart is desperately sick with a rhetorical question, who can understand it (our hearts) (Jer 17:9b)? Only God, the true and all-knowing cardiologist, can (Jer 19:10). Only God can cure our incurable hearts. To be good (virtuous) leaders inside our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in the marketplace, we must willingly and eagerly submit our hearts to God’s grand and meticulous renovation work. How do we participate in our heart renovation? Let me suggest two ways.

To be good (virtuous) leaders inside our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in the marketplace, we must willingly and eagerly submit our hearts to God’s grand and meticulous renovation work.

Becoming More Virtuous

First, we must make a shift: instead of asking “What must I do today,” we must shift to the question, “Who am I becoming today?” Scripture commands us to become virtuous like Christ, Our Lord and Savior. And this requires that we habituate good moral habits, or virtues.

However, I need to interject something here. I work at an osteopathic medical school and get the pleasure of participating in admission interviews with prospective students. One question we commonly ask is, “How do you decide to do something alone versus asking for assistance?” This whole business of habituating good moral habits cannot be done alone; rather, we need supernatural assistance because our wills are quite weak. This means, of course, that we must regularly show up to spend face-to-face time with our virtuous God; and this means we must regularly spend time in Scripture. To make virtues such as love, trust, justice, and kindness instinctual habits, we must practice them in the marketplace (and elsewhere) to cultivate them by the aid of the Holy Spirit. “Virtue is developed [cultivated] through actual practice—by which habits become tendencies, which become instincts, which then become essential nature.” Once our habits become our essential nature, we have habituated these virtues. To use a sports metaphor, when our moral habits become our essential nature, they have become like muscle memory. One way to discipline us to practice and eventually, habituate the virtues is to develop a rule of life. But what is a rule of life?

To make virtues such as love, trust, justice, and kindness instinctual habits, we must practice them in the marketplace (and elsewhere) to cultivate them by the aid of the Holy Spirit.

Establishing a Rule of Life

A rule of life is not a set of laws. This rule of life is not to be exercised legalistically (we don’t engage in a rule of life to earn brownie points with God). The Latin word for rule is regula. A rule of life can help us to regulate our vices and forge a path for our virtues. We need a personal rule of life to advance us toward the telos (or goal) of becoming virtuous persons. To be virtuous is to be wholly ordered toward, in the words of Augustine, “well-ordered love” and consequently, to be—in the truest sense of the word—fully integrated. Here’s an abbreviated form of my rule of life:

1. Thinking God’s Thoughts. Read the Bible daily and journal my thoughts and reflections. Pray Scripture throughout the day. Read a passage two or three times before moving on to the next passage.

2. Work and Rest. Do my work to the glory of God. Also, take a weekly Sabbath to the glory of God. The Sabbath commences on Friday evening and ends on Sunday morning. (In our culture where burnout is praised or viewed as a badge of honor, Sabbath keeping is vitally important.)

3. Mental Development: Feed Imagination. For every nonfiction book, read two fiction books.

4. Steward My Body. Eat more fish and chicken than red meat during the week. Exercise at home at least 3 times a week.

5. Social Media Sabbath. Every year take at least two 30-day breaks from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

6. Cultivate My Heart. Regularly do a “disordered loves” inventory (an idol inventory), and regularly confess my sins to my friends of virtue and seek their prayers. (See below for a discussion of friends of virtue.)

In sum, the goals of a rule of life are to mortify the sinful desires of the flesh and to habituate practices so that being and doing virtuously is like muscle memory. For help on how to develop a personal rule of life, visit conversation.org.

Gathering Virtuous Friends

Second, pray for and gather what Aristotle calls, friends of virtue. What did he mean? Friends of virtue, like my pastor-friend, Bill, are those who are as committed to us as we are to them simply due to a shared commitment to one another’s highest and best good. Friends of virtue are those who tell us the truth, and who we expect to tell us the truth. Friends of virtue know when to give tough love and have hard conversations. Friends of virtue refuse to allow us to bow our knee to the idols of our times, like rugged individualism or denominationalism. Friends of virtue refuse to allow us to go it alone. Virtuous friendships are an indispensable necessity for any leader who hopes to live and lead in a way that honors the call of Christ. Our friends of virtue will hold us accountable to our rule of life. Pray that such friends will emerge in the marketplace or outside the marketplace, and this is one prayer God will answer.

Virtuous friendships are an indispensable necessity for any leader who hopes to live and lead in a way that honors the call of Christ.

Our Active Cooperation

God wants to renovate our hearts. God is actively engaged in this inside job, and promises to complete this project (Philippians 1:6). However, we are urged to actively participate in our heart renovation. As we partner with God, not only will we lead honorably, virtuously, and morally, but others in the places we occupy will benefit and flourish. As we cooperate with God in our inside job—our heart renovation—we will move from a state of disordered loves to a well-ordered love for God and for our neighbor.