The Way of Life: Recollection| Psalm 86
Brian Hedges | October 27, 2024
Let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to Psalm 86. That’s where we’ll be reading together this morning.
A number of years ago, I had a friend who had a background in the military. We went on several trips together, either to conferences or once on a mission trip. Anytime we would go to a new place, my friend would do what he called “recon.” It was reconnaissance. He would essentially survey the area, he would take a long walk around the area, and he would know everything was. He would know where the coffee shops were, he would know where the restaurants were, we would know where the restrooms were in the hotel. He would know where everything was, how to get to our conference center when we were at a conference. He did the same thing when we went on a mission trip to Africa together.
I’ve always remembered that, that this reconnaissance on the front end of the trip was a helpful way to get a survey of the terrain and the surroundings and what was there.
I want to suggest this morning that you and I need to learn to do a kind of reconnaissance as well. It’s what we might call the reconnaissance of the heart, or soul recon, where we know how to pay attention to what’s going on in our hearts and in our souls and in our lives, and we learn a kind of spiritual practice that will help us to do that, to bring our souls into the light of God’s presence and God’s face.
This is the second message in a new, six-week series that we’re doing, called “The Way of Life: Vital Practices for Your Spiritual Journey.” If you were here last week, you’ll remember that we talked about these two ways to live. There is the way of the wicked and the way of the righteous, as we read in Psalm 1, or the broad way and the narrow way, if you take the words of Jesus. One of those ways leads to death and destruction and ruin; the other way leads to life. It leads not only to eternal life, but it is a way that leads to a rich and satisfying life, what Jesus called abundant life. It is a way of living that is characterized by practices that Jesus himself practiced, practices that we see in the Psalm, which is where our focus is in this series, and practices that have come down to us through the centuries, practices known as spiritual disciplines.
In this series we’re looking at a number of these practices together to help us learn how to walk in this way of life and experience the kind of growth and transformation that God has promised to us in the gospel.
Last week our focus was on the practice of meditation. We were in Psalm 1. Today we’re going to be in Psalm 86. I’m going to read the entire psalm as we begin, but I want to focus on one verse in particular, verse 11. So, here’s Psalm 86. I’m reading from the NIV. You can follow along on the screen or in your own copy of God’s word. The psalmist says,
“Hear me, Lord, and answer me,
for I am poor and needy.
Guard my life, for I am faithful to you;
save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God; have mercy on me, Lord,
for I call to you all day long.
Bring joy to your servant, Lord,
for I put my trust in you.
“You, Lord, are forgiving and good,
abounding in love to all who call to you.
Hear my prayer, Lord;
listen to my cry for mercy.
When I am in distress, I call to you,
because you answer me.
“Among the gods there is none like you, Lord;
no deeds can compare with yours.
All the nations you have made
will come and worship before you, Lord;
they will bring glory to your name.
For you are great and do marvelous deeds;
you alone are God.
“Teach me your way, Lord,
that I may rely on your faithfulness;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.
I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart;
I will glorify your name forever.
For great is your love toward me;
you have delivered me from the depths,
from the realm of the dead.
“Arrogant foes are attacking me, O God;
ruthless people are trying to kill me—
they have no regard for you.
But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God,
slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
Turn to me and have mercy on me;
show your strength in behalf of your servant;
save me, because I serve you
just as my mother did.
Give me a sign of your goodness,
that my enemies may see it and be put to shame,
for you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.”
This is God’s word.
Today I want to talk about a kind of spiritual practice that some of you already are practicing but maybe don’t know the name for. It’s been called the practice of recollection, and I’ll explain what that means when we get to it in the message. But it is a kind of spiritual practice that is needed in our lives if we are really to thrive and grow and flourish in our spiritual lives.
We could go about it in this way, looking at three things that I think are implied here in Psalm 86, and especially in verse 11, which will be the focus point of this sermon.
First of all, there’s the need, the need to know God and the self. Then there is the problem, which are the various obstacles. The problem is the various obstacles to this twofold knowing. Then a solution, and the solution is this practice of recollection.
1. The Need: To Know God and the Self
Let’s look at these three things together, beginning with the need, the need to know God and the self. What you see in this psalm is a combination of two things that don’t often come together in our world today.
There is, first of all, a profound honesty about himself. You see this in the words of the psalmist, as he begins by declaring to God his basic need, that he is poor and needy. He’s honest about his need for mercy and his sense of distress and the things that are going on in his life. But you have profound honesty about the self, along with the second thing, a deep and abiding trust in God. There are many expressions of that in the psalm as well, as he directs his soul to the Lord and trusts in God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s compassion in this life.
All of us need that twofold emphasis. We need both an honesty about ourselves and also a deep trust in God. This is what I’m calling the need to know God and the self.
Throughout the centuries, believers have recognized this twofold need as being right at the heart of spiritual life and spiritual wisdom. So, for example, John Calvin, in his great magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, begins the book in this way. These are the opening lines. He says, “Nearly all the wisdom we possess—that is to say, true and sound wisdom—consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
As Calvin then begins to unfold this theological vision of who God is, he is also, at the same time, dealing with the heart. That’s one of the things that makes the Institutes such a wonderful book, because it is applied theology. Calvin essentially argues that we cannot know ourselves unless we know God, and we cannot really encounter the true and living God without also having a deep knowledge of ourselves.
I think Calvin is probably evoking here St. Augustine, who wrote his Confessions and many other wonderful books. Augustine’s prayer—this is from his book The Soliloquies—his prayer was this: “God, who is always the same, may I know myself, may I know you. That is my prayer.” Again, this is characteristic of Augustine. If you’ve read the Confessions you’ll know this, that these two themes—the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self—kind of run through the whole of the Confessions, which is a book-length prayer to God, as Augustine deals with deep honesty about his life, his sins, his needs, his heart, and how God by his grace brought him into a saving, transforming relationship with Christ.
There is something really unique about this double emphasis, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the self, and the two things together. I think it corrects two extremes. We could see, on one hand, within secularism that there is this aspiration to self-knowledge, but it is self-knowledge apart from the knowledge of God. We live in the culture of the self. We live in this age of expressive individualism. And almost any self-help book you read, and most of the psychology you read, and so on, it’s all going to be about understanding yourself.
Now, that’s not all bad. There are actually some very helpful things within that psychological literature. Much of it’s helpful, but the problem is that most of the time there’s a presupposition here about the nature of God and the nature of ultimate reality and right and wrong, presuppositions that are deeply opposed to the teaching of Jesus and to the Christian way.
If it’s really the truth that we live and move and have our being in God, and if God is the ultimate ground of all things, of all reality, and the source of all good, and if to know God is eternal life, then that neglect, the neglect of the knowledge of God, is a fatal neglect. It means that we can do lots of work on ourselves, but if we do that without a corresponding knowledge of God and trust in God, then we’re essentially just rearranging deck furniture on a sinking ship, because we haven’t addressed the most profound need of our lives, which is a restored relationship with God our Creator.
But on the other hand, you also have another extreme. You have this in religion. You have those who pretend to know God but do so without a corresponding knowledge of their own hearts and their selves, and without an application of the knowledge of God to their hearts and to their lives. So you have those who maybe are even orthodox in theology, but that theology has neer been applied. That’s why sometimes we find, even in the church, problems of pretense and hypocrisy and narcissism and deep emotional and relational immaturity and even abuse. We all know the stories, we all know the scandals. There can be someone who’s wonderful theologically, but something got missed. Something got missed, and eventually the darkness in the heart begins to come out. It’s the problem of a deep seeming knowledge of God, maybe orthodox in the content, but without the application of that to the personal life, to the heart and to the soul.
Paul talked about those who profess to know God but deny him in their works. What’s going on there? It is theology without application. It’s the knowledge of God without the knowledge of the self.
Here’s my contention this morning. You and I will never experience real transformation without growing in both of these things, both the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the self. The journey to Christlikeness, the journey to a full and abiding life, a rich and satisfying life, is necessarily both a journey upward as we come to know God more deeply, and it’s also a journey inward, as we come to know ourselves, our own hearts and our souls.
2. The Obstacles to Knowing
Now, the problem is that there are many obstacles to this knowledge, especially this knowledge of ourselves, but really these are obstacles to both kinds of knowing. So that’s point number two, the obstacles to knowing. I want you to see four of these before we then dig into a spiritual practice that will help us to grow in knowing God and knowing ourselves. So, four obstacles to this knowing.
(1) The first one is what we might call disorientation. We all know what it is to be disoriented in a physical way. Maybe if you’ve found yourself really dizzy or you have vertigo or something like that, you’ve lost your balance and you’re disoriented to your environment. Or maybe if you have slept really, really deeply and you’re away from home and you wake up and you’re in a hotel room or another place and it takes you a few seconds to even get oriented to your surroundings, to remember where you are. We know what that confusion feels like in a physical sense.
But in Scripture, many scholars have pointed out that the Psalms essentially take us through these cycles of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation to God. You have the different kinds of psalms.
There are psalms of orientation. These are psalms that express the exuberant trust in God, the deep delight in God, praise and worship of God. It seems like the whole psalm is just full of praise and worship, and it’s showing us a heart that is rightly related to God, oriented to God as our all in all.
But many of the psalms are psalms of disorientation, that show us human beings in their fallen state, dealing with the problems of the heart and of the soul. These are the psalms of lament, psalms that express the anxiety and the fear and the shame and the guilt and the depression and the anger and the doubt and the despair that are in the heart. One of the unique things about the psalms is how honest these authors are with those emotions and those soul problems in their lives.
Then, as the psalmists pray through these emotions, there is a reorientation towards God. It’s what we see here in this psalm, as the psalmist brings to the surface, writing it on the page, the state of his heart, but doing so in the presence of God. You can see this as he names his life situation, he says he’s poor and needy; as he expresses his need for mercy (you see that in verses 3, 6, and 16); as he talks about his distress in verse 7; as he acknowledges this divided, fragmented heart when he prays “unite my heart to fear your name” in verse 11. Then there are his circumstances as he talks about being attacked by enemies.
Take many other psalms and you’ll see other expressions of this—Psalm 42, with the psalmist facing stress in his life and acknowledging the deep discouragement in his heart and his life. It’s a psalm for the depressed. Or Psalm 73, a psalm for those who are doubting, who are slipping into this precipice of doubt and despair because they don’t understand the ways of God. Or take any of the pentitential psalms, where the psalmists deal with the problems of guilt and sin and shame in their lives—Psalm 38 or Psalm 32 or Psalm 51—and so on.
The psalmists are showing us the disorientation of their hearts and how to work through it. This is something every single one of us has to learn to do. We have to learn to name what’s going on inside, be honest with ourselves, and then get ourselves reoriented to God. That’s the first problem: disorientation.
(2) Here’s the second: distraction. We all live with a certain amount of distraction because of our pace of life and because, in our hyper-connected world, we live with an endless stream of information and images and video and media and so on. That distraction makes it harder than ever for us to do what this psalm is talking about—that is, to really bring our hearts still before the Lord, to pray these kinds of prayers, and to get our hearts reoriented to God.
I’ve quoted him before, Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. He’s nailing it on the head, showing us how these computers that we carry in our pockets, smartphones, these are changing the way our brains work, radically changing our lives. Nicholas Carr says,
“What the Internet seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Internet distributes it, in a swiftly-moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words; now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
Maybe you can relate. Maybe you’ve experienced this. Maybe you have found that when you spent an inordinate amount of time online or on your phone or with media that your capacity for concentration and prayer and contemplation—even your capacity for a meaningful conversation with someone—diminishes, much less capacity for deep engagement with God.
I think all of us need to hear the words of Jesus to Martha, as recorded in Luke 10. Martha’s so busy serving in the kitchen, preparing a meal, preparing a table, and she’s upset with her sister, Mary, who’s sitting at the feet of Jesus. And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful.” It’s the problem of distraction.
A number of years ago there was a very well-known pastor who was a very successful pastor at that time in his ministry. He found himself stuck in his spiritual life. He had kind of plateaued. He was not doing well. He decided to call someone who had been helpful to him and kind of mentored him and discipled him. The person he called was Dallas Willard, who’s a well-known author on literature and spirituality.
He asked Willard this question: “What do I need to do? I’m stuck; what do I need to do in my spiritual life?”
Willard paused for a long time, and then he answered the question. He said, “Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
The pastor thought, “That’s good,” and wrote it down. Then he said, “Okay, got it. What’s next? What else?”
And Willard said, “There is nothing else. That’s it. That’s what you have to do.”
That’s a good word for us. One of the most important principles from this whole series that I want us to get is this: if you want to change, if you want to experience the rich and satisfying life, the abundant life that Jesus talks about, you will have to be intentional in dealing with hurry, busyness, and distractions in your life. You’ll have to make decisions about your calendar, about your phone use, about your time online, about your entertainment, and you’ll have to make space in your life, both in time and mental space, you have to make space for the kinds of practices that can actually lead you into a flourishing spiritual life. The problem of distraction.
(3) Here’s a third problem, a third obstacle. It’s what we might call dissipation. This is a word that we actually find in Scripture. It’s not a word that we use very often or understand very well. What is dissipation?
Dissipation is the act of breaking up or scattering something. You might think of storm clouds and the dissipation of the clouds. You have clouds that have built up in the sky, but then when the clouds begin to dissipate and break apart they’re scattering.
There is something that we could call the dissipation of the soul. It is the fragmentation of the soul, or what has been called the “uncentering of the soul on God.” Jesus warns about dissipation. In Luke 21:34 he says, “But watch yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the cares of this life.”
There’s a very powerful illustration of this in one of C.S. Lewis’s books. This is in his book The Pilgrim’s Regress. Some of you are studying right now The Pilgrim’s Progress. This was Lewis’s version of an allegory, kind of based in some ways off of Bunyan, but a very different story. It’s a wonderful read; if you do want to read it, I recommend this version that you can see on the screen, with the annotations. You need the footnotes and the annotations to really get what Lewis is saying. But there’s a scene in The Pilgrim’s Regress where the protagonist, a man named John, comes on this group of men, men who suffer from what Lewis calls “a crumbling and disintegrating disease.”
It’s really grotesque. It’s as if parts of their bodies are taking on a life of their own and transforming into these grotesque creatures, like worms and snakes and reptiles. John watches as a growth on one man’s arm detaches and becomes a “fat, reddish creature” independent of its host.
He realizes that this whole assembly is a fountain of writhing, reptilian life, sprouting out of the human forms, but that walking among them is this dark and beautiful witch whose name is Luxuria. Now, luxuria is the Latin word for the sin of lust in the old list of the seven deadly sins. So Luxuria is walking among these men, and she offers the men a cup from which they can drink. One man is resisting; he’s trying hard not to drink from the cup. He’s pulling away. But he feels so seduced by it that in the end he reaches for the cup, and with a sob he takes the cup, he drinks it, and Lewis says that there’s a motion in his fingers that begins to look something like worms.
Again, it’s a grotesque picture, but it’s a vivid picture that is showing us the destructive, disintegrating power of sin that deforms us and fragments us and enslaves us, turning us into something less than our whole selves.
This is Lewis’s comment, his own explanatory comment on what’s going on. He says, “Lechery [or lust] means not simply forbidden pleasure, but loss of the man’s unity.”
Now, lust will do that, but listen, other sins will do that as well. There are many ways to be dissipated. All of us have probably felt this in some way.
Have you ever found yourself feeling stressed or feeling really weary, feeling really tired, and you just kind of wanted to veg, and so you go into some kind of entertainment-type mode? You just kind of shut your brain off, and say you binge-watch Netflix for several hours, or you play video games for several hours, or you just get on Facebook and you intend to scroll for fifteen minutes and you spend the whole evening doing it.
Or you may do it with a substance. You may overeat; you’re hungry and you start eating, but it becomes a form of medication, like you’re self-medicating. It’s for comfort. Or you do it by overdrinking and abusing alcohol.
Any of these are ways that we can do this, where we are essentially trying to numb the pain in our lives, and the feeling you get when you’re done with this is one of a deeper kind of restlessness, a numbness of soul and a deeper restlessness where you realize you’ve wasted time, you’ve probably hurt yourself, you haven’t helped yourself; you’re certainly not any more centered. If anything, you feel less whole and less alive than you did before.
There’s a poem that’s included in The Pilgrim’s Regress that explains exactly what’s going on. This is the way it goes. Lewis says,
“The witch’s wine,
Though promising nothing, seems
In that land of no streams,
To promise best:
The unrelished anodyne.”
It’s a land of no streams. It promises nothing. But this is why people take it: because it is an unrelished anodyne. Do you know what an anodyne is? It’s a painkiller! This is why we do these things. We do this because we’re trying to numb the pain, the discomfort, the stress, the guilt, the anxiety, the shame, the trauma that we feel deep in our souls. Instead of facing it, instead of dealing with it, we binge-watch. We watch porn or drink too much or scroll social media for three hours and disengage from our family, disengage from ourselves, and disengage from God.
This is the problem of dissipation, and it is a huge obstacle to spiritual growth and spiritual vitality.
(4) Here’s a fourth one, briefly: defensiveness. This is the refusal to notice and to name the reality of our hearts. As long as you’re defensive, as long as you’re not willing to actually deal with this and face yourself, you’re never really going to grow spiritually. There has to be a deep honesty, because if there’s not that what we do is erect false selves and we refuse to take ownership, we present a front to others and maybe even to God and to our own selves, we imagine ourselves better than we are, and we don’t really deal with the issues.
So we need a way, a practice, a method that helps us go deep into our own hearts to know ourselves and to know God and to deal with this fragmented self, so that there is a restoration of unity and wholeness in our lives. The integration of the heart: that’s what we’re after.
3. The Solution: The Practice of Recollection
That leads us to point number three, the practice of recollection. Now again, maybe you’ve never heard this practice named in this way, but I do think it’s biblical, and what I want to do is define it for you, show you some places in Scripture that point us in this direction, and then give you a fairly simple method of putting this in practice in your life.
What is recollection? Let me give you some quick definitions.
Here’s one from Nelson’s New Christian Dictionary: “It is a stage in the interior life where the soul collects itself in prayer by not allowing worldly concerns to distract it. In the life of Christian mystics it is a spiritual exercise by which the soul regains its focus by turning its attention to God.”
That’s what we see the psalmist doing here in Psalm 86, when he says, “Unite my heart to fear your name.” He’s seeking to bring together the scattered, fragmented parts of his soul, have them reunited into a wholeness, a oneness, so that he can focus without distraction on God.
Here’s Eric Johnson, from his book God and Soul Care. He says, “Recollection involves pulling away from the secondary distractions of life and gathering together the fragments of one’s soul in order to direct one’s attention exclusively on God.”
One more. This is from Adele Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. She says, “The prayer of recollection represents a specifically restful attitude of connecting with the reality that God is in me. As we let go of distractions, this prayer recalls the soul to its true center and identity in Christ.”
That’s what we’re after. It is this reconnection with our own hearts and souls and with God, doing this in the presence of God, and doing it in a way that deals with ourselves in reality, as we really are, and bringing ourselves, then, before God.
Now, you might ask, “Where is this taught in Scripture?” Let me just give you some examples.
First of all, we see it right here in Pslam 86:11. I do think this is what this prayer is talking about. “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth. Unite my heart to fear your name.”
Once again, we’re talking about the way of God, the way of life, the way of Jesus. It is a way of engaging with God that leads to life. The psalmist is asking God to teach him that so that he can walk in truth, and in order to do that he prays this prayer: “Unite my heart to fear your name.”
We might think also of Psalm 139:23-24. It is perhaps the best example of a prayer of self-examination in the Bible. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” That’s a wonderful prayer to pray as we bring our hearts and our souls before the presence of an all-knowing God. That’s the theme, of course, of Psalm 139: that God knows everything, that God is everywhere, we cannot escape from his presence, so we open our hearts to him.
Or think of Proverbs 4:23. “Above all else, guard you heart [or watch your heart], for everything you do flows from it.” This is the discipline of keeping the heart or watching the heart, the discipline of watchfulness. That was the language of the Puritans for this.
Or take another example. This is Revelation 3. Do you remember the letter of the risen Lord Jesus to the church of Laodicea? He confronts the church for their lukewarmness; they’re neither hot nor cold. Jesus confronts them for the condition of their hearts. They are self-satisfied; they don’t recognize their true condition.
Remember what he says in verse 17? He says, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.”
There’s the problem in its opposite form. Instead of a whole heart, instead of knowledge of the self, they’re living in denial, and they’re not recognizing their true condition before God.
Take one more example. One of the most famous stories in all the Bible is the story of the prodigal son. You remember this son: he asked for his inheritance early, right, and he leaves and he goes into a far country, and he spends all that he has on riotous living. He spends himself into poverty, and finally he comes to this point where he’s reduced to poverty and he’s eating slop with the pigs. Then the key moment of change comes in Luke 15:17. It says, “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger?’” He had to come to himself. He came to his senses.
There is a moment of awakening and of self-knowledge and of honesty, and that’s the turning point. It’s always the turning point, friends. This is the only way anyone ever overcomes an addiction. This is the only way that real change and transformation happen in our lives; it’s when we come to ourselves, when we see ourselves as we really are. That’s when change can begin to take place.
So, how do you do this? What I’m arguing is that this needs to be a regular practice in our lives. This isn’t a one-time thing, but this is something that you practice. It becomes a part of your rhythm of life. It’s one of the spiritual disciplines that you practice with some regularity.
Some of you are already doing this and you just didn’t know what to call it, but some of you, perhaps, are in desperate need of doing this to deal with the false self, to deal with the ways in which your heart is so fragmented and disoriented and distracted that you’re just not even attending to God and you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in yourself, in your emotions, in your spiritual life, and in your relationships.
How do you practice it? I’ll give you three steps.
(1) Number one: you have to pay attention to the symptoms of unease in your life. It starts right there. You actually have to stop and pay attention to what’s going on.
I’ve been really helped through the writings of a Christian theologian, professor of spirituality, and therapist whose name is Chuck DeGroat. I’ve been reading him for several years. He’s a professor at Western Seminary in Holland, Michigan, and he just released a new book called Healing What’s Within. Here’s a quote from Chuck DeGroat as he describes how to do this and why we need to do it. He says, “Sometimes we drive inattentive to the dashboard warning lights flashing before our eyes.” Think of the lights on the dashboard of your car, telling you that something’s wrong. If the engine light comes on or the oil light comes on, it’s telling you something’s wrong. That’s the metaphor.
“Our lives our busy. We ignore what’s happening within. The kinds of symptoms that emerge when we ignore our warning lights may seem subtle at first. Most of us can manage a few yellow warning lights, or so we think. But sprinkle in a few red warning lights and things get messier.”
Then he gives an example. I want you to see this illustration of the different kinds of symptoms. I’m not going to read through all this, but this is the kind of thing you have to do. So, starting in that upper lefthand corner and working around that list clockwise, he gives five categories for you to pay attention to symptoms in your life.
First of all, there are thoughts. Those thoughts may be confused thoughts, it may be inattentiveness, it might be judgmental thoughts, being overly critical. It may be obsessive kinds of thinking. It might even be suicidal thoughts. There’s a range there from mild to severe, from yellow warning lights to red warning lights. But you have to pay attention to the thoughts. What is the background track in your mind? What are the things that you’re telling yourself? How are you talking to yourself? What are the thoughts that are just kind of there, floating in your mind? Pay attention to that stream of consciousness in your thoughts.
Secondly, emotions. Again, there’s a whole range of emotions. It might be anger, it might be emptiness or fear or guilt or a deep sense of shame or loneliness or panic, sadness—any of those things. All of us feel some of those emotions at some time or another, but you have to learn to pay attention to those emotions. You have to name the emotions. You have to become emotionally aware.
Something that could help you with this, if you have the courage to do it, is you could actually ask someone in your family or someone who knows you well, “What emotions do you see? What do I bring into the room? How do I present myself? What do you feel coming from me when you’re in my presence?” Ask those kinds of questions if you have the courage to do it, and then don’t be defensive, and find out. You may discover that you are presenting more emotion than you’re aware of, and that what’s coming out is either anger or frustration or stress or something else.
You should also pay attention to your body. Sometimes, things we feel in our bodies can be symptoms of things going on in our soul. On the list here are things like headaches and heartburn and out-of-body feelings and racing heart and sleeplessness. Any of those things can be symptoms of things going on in your soul. That’s not always the case, but there is this intimate mind-body connection, and your mind and your heart affect what’s going on in your body. So pay attention to that.
Then there’s behavior. This could be addictive behaviors. If you are addicted to pornography or social media or gaming or alcohol or you’re overeating—any of those kinds of things that you just can’t stop the behavior, you have no control over it—that’s a warning light. Busyness, lack of self-care, self-harm, cutting—any of these kinds of things—these are behaviors that signal something’s wrong inside, and you need to stop and pay attention to the symptoms.
Finally, in relationships. Again, the way you are relating to those around you can be symptoms.
This is the first step: you just have to pay attention.
(2) Here’s the second thing. Secondly, you need to pause long enough to be with whatever it is that you find inside. In other words, don’t deny it, and don’t disocciate. Don’t try to escape it. Don’t numb the pain. Instead, engage it with honesty and with curiosity.
This is difficult to do. This takes a great deal of courage on the part of your heart and your soul, but this is the essential key. You have to actually face reality that’s going on within.
One of the best ways to do this is to start noticing the ways in which you tend to stuff the feelings down. Let me give you an exercise for paying attention; this comes from DeGroat again. You can just work through this and fill in the blanks. This is very helpful.
“Right now, I am choosing not to numb or distract, but simply to be with [fill in the blank: your sadness, your headache, your anger, whatever it is]. In the past, I would [fill in the blank: describe how you would disconnect.]”
“I would binge-watch Netflix. I would play video games for three hours. I would watch pornography. I would drink a caseful of beers.” Or whatever it is. How do you tend to disconnect? Name that.
“But now, with God’s Spirit in me, I will stay connected and present, whatever comes. I’ll receive God’s compassion and offer myself compassion.”
Listen, the point here is not to heap guilt on you. That’s not the point. The point is to bring your soul into the presence of God, to be honest with what’s really going on, so that then, in the presence of God, having named the issues, you can bring yourself to God and God can begin to bring healing and restoration and repentance and change and transformation into your life.
(3) That leads to step number three, which is bring all the fragmented parts of yourself before God. You see, the last thing in the world we need to do is just bring before God the best version of ourselves. That’s not real. We’re not dealing with reality. Instead, we have to bring to God ourselves as we really are. Bring those fragmented parts. That’s what the psalmist is doing when he says, “Unite my heart to fear your name.” “Take the different pieces of my heart, take these emotions, these stresses, this guilt, this shame, these desires, this ummet longing—take all of this and unite it together and make me whole again so that I can really worship you, I can serve you with a whole heart.”
Brothers and sisters, the reason why we can do this is because God is a compassionate and a gracious God who is slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness. Of course, that’s language that comes straight out of Exodus 34, where God revealed himself to Moses on the mountain. This is God in his covenant relationship with his people. In other words, it’s the gospel that gives us the courage to actually deal with our hearts in this way, to give us this kind of freedom.
I believe that when we put this practice into our lives, when we do this with some regularity, bringing our hearts before the Lord, that real change and real transformation will begin to happen.
Let me close with a quotation from a man name Dietrich von Hildebrand. He was a Catholic philosopher from Germany, one who stood against Adolf Hitler and the whole Nazi regime during World War II. He actually was eventually exiled, he had to leave Germany, he immigrated to the United States. He wrote a wonderful book called Transformation in Christ. He talks about recollection. Here’s a summary of some of what he says that I found so helpful, so inviting.
“What, then, is recollection? It is primarily an antithesis to distraction. It also embodies an antithesis to all superficial diversion as such. It means an integration of the entire person, a realization of its true self out of the depths of its being. In recollection we recover our deepest orientation toward God. Through finding our way to God, we find our way home to ourselves.”
Now friends, that’s the path of transformation. You will never become your truest, deepest self until you are yourself as you’re renewed and remade in Jesus Christ. And you will find that only as you are oriented to God. But it takes honesty, it takes some time, it takes prayer, it takes praying this prayer: “Unite my heart to fear your name.”
Let’s pray together.
Gracious God, we ask you now by your Spirit to apply these things to our hearts and lives and to give us the intentionality, the will, the desire, the resolve to make space for this kind of heart work, so that there can be a reordering of our desires and of our loves, of our fears, of our hopes, so that those parts of us that are fragmented, disoriented, parts of us that take us away from you, are reintegrated into our lives, into a whole heart, a single mind, where we learn to love you with all of our hearts, all of our souls, all of our mind and our strength. Lord, this is something we need. My guess is there’s no one here this morning who does not need this in some degree. We live with such distraction in our lives that we find it difficult to do this, but my prayer is that by your Spirit you’d give us the desire for it. Help us see the value of it, and give us the space to do it. May your Spirit work and bring about the change and transformation we need.
As we come to the Lord’s table now, we ask you to meet us. As we receive the elements of the bread and the juice, may we do so with a deep and abiding trust in Jesus Christ, whose body was broken and whose blood was shed so that we could be restored and remade into your image. So draw near to us in these moments, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
