Dear friend,
This morning finds me back in bed for the first time in a good two weeks of participation. I am deeply grateful for the precious moments and days I had with more lucidity and energy. Sam and I have been talking about lives of worship, and I’d like to put some of it down on paper. Feel free to listen in.
Deep down somewhere we all carry a longing to be seen. I make a huge number of choices, often without realising it, based on an audience. An audience who is not God. It’s like I have a mini self promoter complete with collecting things from my life to share later. “That moment will look good on Facebook... Jess will be impressed when I tell her that... How am I going to make that sound better when I explain it?... That’s a great moment for the story of my life book... hopefully someone will share this story around cos it makes me sound great... I won’t do that because people might not get it...” My own PR team are very busy.
But God wants us to live lives that are for his eyes only.
“All the fairest beauties in the human soul, it’s greatest victories, and it’s most splendid achievements are always those which no one else knows anything about or barely glimpse.” (Hannah Hurnard)
When I read this the other day I was so challenged by it. Do I really think the most important and beautiful things in my life are the secret choices I make in my heart? Do I really believe that when I choose Jesus in the depths of myself, when no one sees the decision, it counts? Do I value the changes and the life God is creating in me, if no one else sees it or comments on it? Sometimes it feels like if no one but God knows about it, it’s not even real.
Jesus says, “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21)
I know this is about money and where we put our wealth. But I feel like in our culture we also have a currency of perception, a currency of reputation. We are consumed by what others think about us, whether we realise it or not.
If I spend my time building up my online profile, I will look great online. If I promote myself to other people, I will look great to other people. But what will be underneath? And what will I loose to carry such a burden of trying to manage my own self promotion?
I need to build up my treasure in the right place. God calls us to build a cathedral to him in our hearts. And we spend all our time on the billboard down the road advertising it. When he gives us jewels and gifts, instead of using them for his praise and worship, we use them to sell ourselves. We use them to self promote.
If I have a special day with my family, I want everyone to know, so that they will see how happy I am and how blessed I am and how successful I am at running my own life. If I have an amazing connection with Jesus I want it to shine out of my face, or to tell people about it so they will think I am super spiritual. And when I go unnoticed, I feel like I am of less value. So I literally use Gods grace in my life to make myself look better. I literally use him to sell myself! How in need of grace I am.
But if I spend time on my heart, on worshipping Jesus, if I prioritise the secret choices, then I feel his pleasure. If I choose Jesus, even when it hurts, he sees and he knows and he loves it. If I spend time building a cathedral in my heart, purely for the love of Jesus, I put my treasure in the right place. In the place where fickle people do not make me feel bad about myself, where my self worth is not dependent on how ‘well’ I’m doing, but who he is, all the time. And as I walk in this truth more and more, I begin to carry an assurance that he sees me.
As I position myself more this way- the way that says it is the cathedral in my heart that really matters, the secret walk with Jesus that really counts, I am experiencing the joy of that relationship more. His pleasure and his delight in me are more important and more obvious. They are also more readily given by him than the world, it’s just harder to hold somehow.
Just like a child, my floundering heart needs to work out of the security of being loved, before it can love others. And in the depths of me I need to have more of the presence of Jesus to reassure me and to speak over and over, the love he has for me. This is what the gift of the Holy Spirit coming to live in us is all about. We don’t need to go to the temple to worship, because he lives in us. And we carry him with us and we can share him with others, loving people with his love, seeing people through his eyes. Seeing the world changed through his resurrection power, alive in us. But that all starts in the secret, in the quiet, where we let his presence dwell in us. When we say yes to him even though it costs us. Where we spent the long years putting stones on top of one another in the cathedrals in our hearts.
When Solomon builds the temple in the Old Testament, he says, “who is able to build a temple for Him, since the heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain Him? Who then am I to build a temple for him?” (2 Chronicles 2:6-7)
God loves to choose people who do not deserve it. He loves to do ridiculous things like put his unlimited presence into a messy, limited, broken heart. He loves to come and live in the stable. It is an honour that I can barely begin to understand that the living God would choose to come and make his home in me.
And then we can choose to let him change our hearts into places that are beautiful and full of splendour. Places where Jesus is there wondering around all the time because he loves it so much. The inside of Solomon’s temple was literally covered in hammered gold. It must have looked stunning.
It took seven long years of building. There are no shortcuts for this kind of work.
If we want hearts that host the presence of God, places of worship in the very centre of us, lives that radiate from the place of knowing we are perfectly, deeply loved, we need to start prioritising secret work in our hearts. We need to remember that if that’s all we build in our lifetimes, then God is just as pleased as if everyone knows about it— perhaps more so, because it is all for him.
I’d love to become a person who has so much closeness with Jesus in secret that all else is unnecessary. I want my heart to be undivided and undistracted. I want my life song to be for his ears. I want to live under his gaze, heart fixed on the love in his eyes. I want there to be a beautiful cathedral in my heart, for the praise and glory of the one who I love most of all.
Katy x