“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
A young Christian pastor and leader faced a real dilemma. He loved the gospel, he loved the church, he loved ministry, and he wanted to serve. But things had turned grim in his country. Religious liberty was being restricted. The political climate was growing steadily more ominous. Churches were being tightly monitored, and pastors were being warned to keep their teaching as innocuous as possible, lest they arouse the suspicions of the authorities. This young leader was on the radar as a possible threat.
Friends from abroad, knowing of the rapidly deteriorating situation in his homeland and his gifts as a scholar, offered him an academic position and fresh opportunities in a far-away country. He could study, write, preach, and serve without facing any of the hostilities of his own nation. His writings and talents could still serve his people, even from a distance, but without the threats and distractions. He accepted the offer, set his affairs in order, said his goodbyes to family and friends, and sailed to the United States. He arrived to a warm welcome and took quickly to the open doors and opportunities presented to him.
However, our young pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, grew increasingly conflicted. He reflected on the many Christians still laboring in what was then Nazi Germany. He thought of his initial call and desire to serve the German people, and he began to feel guilty and grieved that he had left them behind to struggle and suffer, even as he was now free from such cares. As time went by, his deep love for God, for truth, for the gospel, and for the German people decided the case for him. He would go back. When he told those who had welcomed him to America of his decision, he was met with shock and fervent protests. Had he lost his mind? Was he not paying attention to the news? The political situation was escalating and showed no signs of reversing. But Bonhoeffer did return. It was a decision that eventually cost him his life. His earlier desire for what was expedient, seemingly wise, or best for himself was overruled by his deeper sense of what was ultimately right before the Lord. A higher love overruled the selfish love that would elevate self-preservation above self-sacrifice.
In Matthew 22:36-40, Jesus responds to a lawyer’s question about the greatest commandment. It’s one of the rare occasions when Christ offers a straightforward answer: he tells this legal expert that we must first love the Lord our God with all that we are (heart, soul, mind, and strength). But then he expands on his answer by telling his interlocutor that the second greatest commandment is to love one’s neighbor as oneself. The sequence here is crucial. Only if you love the Lord your God with all that you are will you be able to love others as yourself. Trying to love others selflessly on your own strength is an exercise in futility. Scripture is crystal clear that “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Our Lord’s primal act of love inaugurates our own relational capacities, and this same love liberates us to prioritize others—to take up our crosses and lay down our lives for the sake of the world.
As a young Christian I had missed the point about the centrality of love in the Christian life. It was there in so many passages, hidden in plain sight. How did I miss it? One reason is an all-too-common mistake in our Western and North American churches: I had been trained to think that the most important issue was the accuracy of my beliefs and that my priority consisted in securing the correct information. Without realizing it I had deeply absorbed the idea that information saves. If we were to update Christ’s commands to reflect the assumptions of so many of our churches, they might read like something along the lines of you shall understand the Lord your God with all your mind. And the second is like it. You shall teach your neighbor all that they must know about the Lord.
These kinds of renderings always risk oversimplification and caricature, so hear me carefully. I am not denigrating the life of the mind. Indeed, as an apologist I’m consistently highlighting the fact that Christ includes the mind in his supreme command! Along with 1 Peter 3:15-16, Paul also exhorts us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12:2) and to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). I’m also keenly aware of the importance of knowledge in the Christian life. In Hosea 4:6 the prophet gives voice to the Lord’s indictment,
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge;
because you have rejected knowledge,
I reject you from being a priest to me.
And since you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children.
As Dallas Willard argues, “Belief cannot reliably govern life and action except in its proper connection with knowledge and with the truth and evidence knowledge involves.”1
At the same time, we can’t overlook the relational nature of the knowledge Hosea is talking about. The Lord’s accusation carries tremendous force because his people don’t know him personally; they have no relationship with him. It’s the same travesty that underlies the chilling verses in Matthew 7:21-23:
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then will I declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.” (Emphasis added.)
Our knowledge of our heavenly Father is predicated on our love for him, not on our knowledge about him. Plenty of non-Christian academics, for instance, know more about Christianity than the faithful believers who gather in the pews each Sunday. They may have written countless articles and books on Christ’s incarnation and could run circles around us on the history of the early church. But it would also be entirely accurate to say that they don’t truly know Christ at all. They know a lot about him, in the same way that an art historian knows a lot about Henri Matisse. C. S. Lewis makes an important distinction between the initial “assent to a proposition” (e.g., that God exists) and the culminating “adherence to this God”: “You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.”2 Yes, knowing about God is crucial, but we cannot know him in the deepest sense until we have first given him our hearts. This is the practical reality of love’s priority in the Christian life.
Why is the heart so central? As Dallas Willard says, “The human heart, will, or spirit is the executive center of human life. The heart is where decisions and choices are made for the whole person.”3 Here we find a clear picture of the frequent discrepancy between words and actions. If someone claims to follow Jesus but leads a life of unremitting selfishness, it’s clear that their hearts are captive to something else. In Jesus’ own words, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8).
Indeed, a convincing public display of honoring the Lord with our lips frequently requires a high degree of training and theological accuracy. Since we place such a high premium on intellectual achievement, we tend to celebrate people who are skilled at publicly honoring the Lord. This focus on the sheen of a gospel presentation is one of the peculiar marks of Christian celebrity culture. Theological accuracy is important, of course, but it doesn’t guarantee genuine faith. Sadly, our cultural moment is punctuated by a growing roster of accomplished church leaders whose offstage lives tell a story that’s profoundly at odds with their professed convictions. As disconcerting as it sounds, it’s entirely possible to master Christian discourse without giving one’s heart to Jesus. This is why our Lord makes it clear that we can’t afford to be naive about the primacy of love in our lives. The mark of a true disciple remains a surrendered heart.
Despite the waning influence of the church in the United States, the nation still retains a good deal of its Christian heritage. When we moved to the Bible Belt South in 1998, I was unprepared for the challenge of cultural Christianity. Though I remained unmoved by the glossy appeals of Christian celebrity culture and the duplicity of seeing the church as nothing more than a social club, I began to notice some alarming symptoms in Cameron. As a product of a missionary household, he remained adept at giving lip service to the gospel—the only requirement for many people around us. But I lived with him and didn’t have the luxury of taking him at his word. His attitude had gone from sullen to downright hostile, and his interest in all things outré was now degenerating into a growing fascination with the occult. Part of me was deeply confused. As someone who had fled the ravages of a life without Christ, I knew firsthand the stark difference between the man I once had been and the man I had become. To carry on some sort of spiritual charade in order to lead a double life made no sense to me. But my son was a master at fooling those around him. Worst of all, he was beginning to fool himself—to believe his own lies.
The fear-protects mindset would have clear protocol here: seize control and monitor all of the child’s actions, confiscate any offending items, and place tight strictures on all future activities. As we’ve seen, another strategy is to replace what’s been erased: fill the calendar with “spiritual activities” like church camps, youth events, and conferences. While these resources have their place, they remain powerless before a hardened heart. The Lord alone has authority in this treacherous region.
So what do we do? Am I offering a counsel of despair? By no means. We may not have control over our child’s heart, but we do have the ability to address the child’s heart rather than the head alone. Cameron wasn’t lacking in information; he was lacking in devotion. He knew all the right answers regarding his faith, but his actions—the underlying motivations of his life—told a completely different story. In the sobering words of James, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). Cameron will fill in the details in his biographical interlude, but I knew that his heart was not surrendered to Christ, and so I decided to address my question to his heart.
To return to a pivotal morning that comes up repeatedly in this book because it was such a watershed moment, I turned to my son as he was making breakfast before school one day and asked him, “Why do you call yourself a Christian?” Notice that I didn’t ask him what he thought about Christianity or whether he understood it. Again, those are important questions, but I wanted to hear why he lived the way he did—I wanted him to deal with his actions, not his words. Though the question angered him at the time—heart questions are prone to do that—it proved instrumental in turning his life around. To this day Cameron names this as one of the most important moments in the recovery of his faith. I must confess that at the time it simply felt like another strained conversation that ended on an abrupt note.
Nothing quite prepares us for the spiritual challenge of seeing our kids flounder in their relationship with Christ. To make matters worse, there is no fail-safe formula, no expert, no conference, no podcast that can preclude or resolve this struggle. There is, however, the vital perspective of recognizing the primacy of love in human life, and we would do well to begin by addressing the heart.
In Luke 18, Jesus encounters a rich young ruler who is eager to learn the secret of eternal life: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v. 18). Jesus immediately cuts to the heart of the matter by asking why the man calls him good, since “God alone is good.” The question is testing this man’s actual convictions concerning Jesus. As we’ve seen, it’s one thing to view Jesus as a “good teacher” and quite another to do what he says. Jesus then gives an overview of the commands, and the rich young ruler affirms that he keeps them all. With penetrating spiritual insight Jesus then addresses this man’s heart directly: “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (v. 22). Deeply saddened, the man walks away (v. 23). This man’s immense wealth outweighed his devotion to Christ.
The problem was not one of understanding but rather of the heart. Treasure in heaven could not compete with his earthly treasure. We see a marked contrast later in the same chapter when Peter points to the fact that all of the disciples have given up everything to follow Jesus, a clear sign of their authentic devotion. Christ responds, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life” (vv. 29-30). Our devotion to Christ may well set us at odds with our very family members, but if our hearts belong to him, we must forsake all for his sake.
During these trials of faith within our households, may I suggest that we follow our Lord’s advice by first addressing the hearts of our children? By doing so, we will push them to move beyond what they say they know and help them to deal with what they believe. They may not appreciate it, but addressing the heart removes the luxury of self-denial.
I began at ground zero at my conversion. This spiritual immaturity stood in marked contrast to my wife, Mary, who had grown up in a Catholic home in the United States and had given her life to Christ when she was introduced to the gospel in a Bible study during her teenage years. She went on to study missions in college—an experience that fostered in her an abiding love of God’s Word. Despite our different backgrounds, when we met we were both committed to the radical lifestyle and calling of mission and faithfulness that we saw in Scripture, and both of us sought to build our lives on God’s Word and his way. Our imaginations were fired by the life of Christ, the call to be disciples, and the demand to follow his call to the ends of the earth. This call took us from our respective native lands to Vienna, Austria, where we lived for over twenty years.
We embraced the call to serious nonconformity to the spirit and mood of our age. We wanted to be different, to be focused, to be committed. John Stott captures the spirit of our endeavors in his book The Radical Disciple: “Here then is God’s call to a radical discipleship, to a radical nonconformity to the surrounding culture. It is a call to develop a Christian counterculture, a call to engagement without compromise.”4
Young and zealous, we were part of a vibrant community that sought to seriously follow God’s Word in exploring simple living and service. Our mission stressed dedication to the advance of the gospel, and it nurtured a committed attempt to embody the truth as faithfully as we could. George Verwer, who founded OM in the 1960s, sought to do whatever was necessary to advance the gospel. His dedication soon attracted hundreds of students who wanted to be a part of the movement. They fanned out into many countries, particularly those who were unreached or resistant to the gospel. The team Mary and I joined was called the Greater Europe team and was focused on the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Looking back, I can now describe my spiritual journey as a journey of the heart. I was launched into a sea of change. I had made a clean break from my former way of life. In stark contrast to the hyper-individualistic pursuit of freedom that characterized my early years, I was now being instructed by the Gospels on the servant love of Christ, and I was seeing firsthand that self-denial is at the center of daily living. The diversity on display in God’s kingdom also confronted me with another challenge: I was learning what it meant to work in ethnically, denominationally, economically, and socially diverse teams. Dealing with sin and relational tensions, denying self, and actively seeking to serve others—these were not simply spiritual aspirations but essential ingredients for doing the Lord’s work.
Most galling was the fact that taking up one’s cross was not limited to our evangelistic endeavors. I had to take care of those around me, including the annoying people who kept raiding my closet and borrowing my shirts. One gentleman had the habit of grinning and simply saying, “Brother, I felt the liberty.”
In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis inserts these cunning words into the mouth of his senior devil:
Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the [vices] inward into the Will. It is only in so far as [the virtues] reach the Will and are there embodied in habits that [they] are really fatal to us.5
The first task in serving others is learning to serve the people right in front of you. A consistent strategy of the enemy is to move your neighbor to the realm of fantasy, or, better still, to an anonymous crowd or audience. Though there’s nothing wrong with a public ministry, the stage imposes a distance that’s often exploited by the enemy. It’s in this sense that many highly effective evangelists with thriving ministries expend all their energy on strangers in a crowd while neglecting the people closest to them.
I cannot imagine a more realistic or practical setting to test a person’s commitment to love than those early days on the mission field. Nothing will reveal your commitment to servanthood quite like shared living space. Love for God was tied clearly to our love for one another in the biblical vision: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). Verwer and the other leaders of OM were very clear about the practical implications of love. There is nothing like shared work and deadlines to test the mettle and hearts of all.
This lesson was vividly driven home to me when the crew of one of our OM ships was confronted with a blockage in the septic tank. These vessels greatly expanded the evangelistic reach of our organization and thus served as emblems of self-sacrifice. However, this time that self-sacrifice would take on a much more visceral connotation; the only way to fix the blockage was to climb into the tank and unclog the drain by hand. A heated argument arose about who would venture into this fetid chamber. As voices continued to rise, one of the OM leaders calmly stepped forward, suited up, and fixed the blockage. To this day I’m hard-pressed to find a more practical example of servant-hearted leadership.
I was often impressed by the lives and devotion of my brothers and sisters from other countries. One Dutch brother was an incredible example. He was a prayer warrior and a dedicated evangelist who exuded love and compassion. I well remember one exchange when he said to me, “People don’t care how much you know, but they do know how much you care.” At first I resisted his comment, but as time went by I came to see that this kind of loving expression was indeed at the heart of Christianity. Not love as a mere idea or moral belief but love as an embodied expression of compassion, service, and deeds on a daily basis.
James K. A. Smith offers a compelling description of how this embodied expression of our faith begins to shape us. “Christian formation is a conversion of the imagination effected by the Spirit, who recruits our most fundamental desires by a kind of narrative enchantment—by inviting us narrative animals into a story that seeps into our bones and becomes the orienting background of our being-in-the-world.”6 The daily dynamics of our team life in OM confirm Smith’s words. We met every day for devotions, followed by our work assignments. Wednesday evenings were reserved for an extended time of prayer when we covered the nations with intercession. We also heard requests from OM fields and personnel from around the globe. These prayer meetings often began at 7:30 p.m. and stretched into the wee hours of the morning. We were being trained to see and value what was most essential in life and in God’s kingdom.
But my incipient devotion was often equal parts sincere and comical. On one occasion I went to an evening get-together for singles. Primed for an intense night of Bible sharing, testimonies, worship, and prayer, I was horrified to discover that we were there to watch TV! I was offended. Were we not set apart from the world? Did we not gather as his people for his purposes? Why this descent into secular carnality? In protest I sat behind a sofa and read my Bible until the time came for us to go home. What I lacked in maturity I more than made up for in sincerity. One young lady in particular greeted my courageous devotion with a sardonic smile, and our subsequent years of marriage have not erased the hilarity of this incident for her; Mary still laughs every time it’s mentioned. I had much to learn—and much to unlearn.
I eventually got over my aversion to movies, and I’ve since stopped doing my devotions behind other people’s couches at parties. It was in these more mature years that I encountered Roland Joffé’s film The Mission. The character played by Robert De Niro, Rodrigo Mendoza, is a slave trader in the 1740s selling the Guarani people of northeastern Argentina to nearby plantations. After killing his brother in a fight over a lover, he is racked by guilt and sorrow and seeks to atone for his sins. He enlists the help of the missionary to the Guarani people, Father Gabriel (played by Jeremy Irons).
In a justly celebrated scene, he is climbing a cliff face beside a waterfall. To do penance for his former mercenary career, he carries a massive burden filled with his weapons and armor, the tools of his trade. A ragged effigy of his former self, we see him staggering over the treacherous terrain with fierce determination, his body caked in mud. He has worn himself down and his energy is gone. Finally, when he’s on the verge of collapse, a Guarani tribesman approaches him with a dagger. He freezes and awaits his fate, keenly aware that he is responsible for destroying so many of these people’s lives. The man brings the dagger to his neck but then pulls it away and cuts the rope holding the massive burden. He then flings it into the river where it quickly sinks from view. Like Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, Mendoza is liberated, set free. He begins to weep as the rest of the natives gather around him, touching and embracing him.
It remains one of the more compelling pictures of redemption in modern cinema. The movie then goes on to chart his journey into faith, but this journey remains a battle for his heart. Toward the conclusion of the movie he is once again tempted to pick up arms, this time to fight in defense of the Guarani people. The film doesn’t offer pat answers. Father Gabriel, driven by his vision of Christ’s greatest commands, is willing to lay down his life, not just for the Guarani people but also for their oppressors. Mendoza, driven by his sense of injustice, is willing to take up the sword again to fight for those he had once exploited. Whatever we believe about the rightness or wrongness of these men’s choices, the film offers a powerful demonstration of the primacy of our hearts in all that we do.
How do we form our hearts in such a way that we are guided by a vision, a way of life, and a set of practices that shape us into the kind of people Christ calls us to be? In John 15:13, Jesus tells us, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” This sacrificial love is the unique contribution of the gospel. It is in stark contrast to the modern vision of self-indulgence, self-fulfillment, and self-expression, all of which put selfishness front and center. The problem for many of us is that our Christian models are often merely baptized versions of what the culture offers, while the radical demands of the love that God’s character reveals and that God offers are neglected, ignored, or reframed to suit modern tastes, preferences, and sensibilities.
If we want families that follow Christ, then we need to nurture this love in our homes and make sure everything we do is an expression of it. If we find ourselves or our family members faltering in this crucial endeavor, we would do well to begin by following our Lord’s example and addressing the heart.