The Deep Hearted Journey Continues: Obstacles to Avoid on the Way

As you pursue deep heartedness, you’ll use its three aspects (knowing God, yourself, and others) as coordinates that give you your location and show you the direction you should head in. Again, it’s a journey to a land many haven’t known but must be found in order to experience the abundant life Jesus longs to give us. As you head in that direction, there’s also three major obstacles to avoid: self-absorption, morbid introspection, and being driven by emotion.

Being deep hearted is not an encouragement to indulge our already too prevalent self-absorption. Calvin was painfully accurate when he said that “there is no one who does not cherish within himself some opinion of his own pre-eminence.” Self-absorption, then, isn’t simply pridefully thinking of ourselves more highly than we should, but also thinking of ourselves more often than we ought.

Nor is being deep hearted a desire to give oneself over to morbid introspection. While it is helpful to examine ourselves periodically- as this blog will encourage us to do- it is not helpful to always be “putting our soul on a plate and dissecting it,” as Martin Lloyd-Jones would say.

The last obstacle to avoid is being overly focused on emotion. The biblical notion of heart includes emotions as one of its beautiful and vital movements, but it also entails the orientation of our minds, the movement of our wills, and the deepest desires that reside within us. We must know all of these to most fully flourish.

John Stott, in his classic book The Cross of Christ, stated that the reason we humbly pursue self-understanding is for the sincere purpose of self-giving. By grace, we give all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength to our extravagantly loving God in an overflow of worship. By grace, we give our hearts, energy, and time to others in sacrificial love. As Stott says, “How can one give what one does not know one has?” The more we know, the more we can joyfully give away.

We know what to watch out for. We know what direction to head in.

Let’s go!