God in the Heart

What we do does not come out of nowhere, it comes out of what is in our hearts. We typically think that what is there is our plans, our projects, our desires, because these drive our actions, but our heart is driven not just by what is there, but by who. We are not isolated monads, we are people built for relationship, and the most profound relationship is our relationship with God. God’s effect on our hearts is intense, even like burning: in the Gospels, the disciples encountering the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus described their “hearts burning” within them as Jesus talked with them on the road. [Luke 24:32] To understand this heart-relationship with God properly, we need more than just a sense of intensity, we need some sort of structure. Happily, we have one: the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

The adjective “theological” is a combination of two Greek words, “theos” (God) and “logos” (knowledge), and it means knowledge of God. The virtues of faith, hope and love are all about knowledge of God. This is not abstract knowledge, it is “up close and personal” knowledge: faith, hope and love all describe our living knowledge of who God is. This is knowledge that is not just an idea but a relationship: God with us and we with God. Faith, hope and love are all different aspects of this relationship.

Faith, the theological virtue of the past, is rooted in memory, our knowledge of who God is based on what God has shown and done. This is most fully the case in Jesus, God become a human being to show us what God is like and to do for us what he wanted done, to save us from an existence detached from God, to save us from death. The memory of faith may be our own, from our own experience, and it may be one shared with us by another, by the community of faith. Faith, lived out, is belief (from “be” and “live”). To live in faith is to think and act in a way that is fully consistent with God’s presence and his character, regardless of how visible or obvious God might be at a particular moment. To live communally in faith is to live and act as a community that is in full harmony with God’s presence and character. It is to act towards others and towards God in a way fully consistent with who God is and what he does.

Hope, the theological virtue of the future, is rooted in anticipation: our knowledge of what God is yet to do in his ongoing relationship with us. All living relationships are dynamic: they change, they are constantly becoming something more than what they were, and none so much as our relationship with God. The main reason for this is that our relationship with God is not a relationship of equals, it is a relationship of lesser with greater, a relationship made possible only because the greater, in order to be reached, became lesser. God became a human being like us, Jesus, to enter into a relationship with us. In this relationship, if we allow it, God draws us towards him, and he continually transforms us, making us simultaneously more and more like him and yet more and more ourselves. This may sound contradictory but it is not: God made us to be with him and to be like him, but not in every aspect, but in a way that is unique to each one of us specifically. As a ruby enhances a crown differently than a sapphire or a diamond, so each of us, in becoming who we are meant to be, become more truly ourselves. This happens not just individually but in community, too. God is not just making each of us more ourselves, he is making our community more what it is meant to be: the crown becomes more and more the crown it is meant to be as each gemstone in it becomes more brilliant in its unique way. This is why the Church, of all the various organizations that have risen and fallen in human history, is the oldest that remains. It survives not because people are good at maintaining communities, but because for all the flaws that may be in people in the Church, and there are many, God is present too, and despite our roadblocks and shortcomings, he is, bit by bit, making us into what he has in mind for us to be.

Love, the theological virtue of the present, is rooted in presence. God is with us, we are with him, and that presence requires a response. Love is that response. First, God loves us, by giving up of himself for our good, not abstractly, but concretely, by becoming a human being, Jesus, who loved us so much that he gave his life for us. We love him back, not because we have to (this is not the stuff of transaction and contract) but simply because it is the authentic response of our being to his love. God is present in the here and now and he loves us, here and now. We are present in the here and now, and we can love him back, right here, right now. In giving himself to us now, God invites us to give ourselves to him now, and when we do, we are living in love. This, too, has a communal dimension: God calls us to love not only him, but others, because he loves not only us, he loves others too. If we love God, we cannot hate those who God loves. This is why God wants us to love even our enemies, not because love is an innate response to enmity (it is not), but because to love those who God loves, solely because God loves them, is to love God himself.

Love, with faith and hope, is our heart-life in God, with God, for God. Love is about God. Faith is about God, Hope is about God. It is all about him. When we fix our hearts on God, everything we do comes out of our heart, where God is. This means our actions when God is present and working in our hearts are not things in themselves understood in isolation, having to do with only our own ideas and desires, they become symptoms of our heart-fever, our hearts burning with God. If we are on fire for God and God is on fire in us, we are filled with faith, hope and love, and everything we do shows it. Our hearts are revealed in what we do and how we live, and in that, God is visible.

The eternal life God offers to human beings is God himself. Yet God, although infinite and eternal, does not overwhelm or absorb us, but instead he gives himself to us, to be with us forever, to be in us, and to teach us everything. Because the eternal life God offers is God himself, if we wish to understand it, we need to understand something about who God is.

As Christians, to understand God, we look to Jesus. Jesus calls God his Father, and he himself is God’s only begotten son [John 3:16] conceived by the Holy Spirit [Luke 1:35]. Clearly Jesus is a different person from the Father and the Holy Spirit, and he refers to them throughout the Gospels as persons distinct from himself [John 1:32-33, 2:16, 3:8, 3:35, 7:39, 14:26, 15:1, Mark 8:38, Luke 1:35 and may other places]. Yet Jesus does not claim to be a separate god, as Ares is the son of Zeus, or Thor is the son of Odin. Jesus asserts God is one [Mark 12:29]. He says that no one knows the Father except the Son [Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22], and no one sees the Father except the Son [John 6:46]. No one can come to the Son unless drawn by the Father [John 6:44], yet no one comes to the Father except through the Son [John 14:6]. The Father and the Son are one [John 10:30].

And there is more. Jesus uses for himself [John 8:58] God’s name as given to Moses [Exodus 3:14]. Jesus tells his followers the Father will send the Holy Spirit [John 14:26] and yet, without contradiction, Jesus himself baptizes with the Holy Spirit [John 1:33], and he personally breathes on the apostles, saying to them “Receive the Holy Spirit” [John 20:22]. Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will be sent “by the Father” [John 14:26] and also that Jesus himself will send the Spirit [John 15:26]. None of this is contradictory because Jesus is not a separate god, nor is the Holy Spirit a separate god. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all one God, and all of these things are consequences of their one-ness, their unity.

Jesus directly explains his unity with the Father in a conversation with Philip, one of his apostles:

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. [John 14:8-11]

Jesus’ mention of “works” here is a reference to the many miracles he performed, ranging from healing the sick, freeing the possessed, and raising the dead, of which Philip himself is a witness. Jesus knows it is difficult for Philip to understand that while Jesus prays to his Father and speaks of his Father and clearly is a separate person from his Father, that Jesus is yet one with the Father. To see Jesus is to see the Father.

The truth of three divine persons in one God is called by Christians the Trinity, from trius, Latin for three-fold. While three persons in one God may be hard to understand, as Jesus explained to Philip, it is yet so. Jesus’ explanation to Philip does not relax either the three-ness of the divine persons or the one-ness of God. Jesus simply points out that in the same way as miracles, which are things that seemingly cannot happen, do happen before Philip’s eyes, so three persons in one God, a thing which seemingly cannot be, is yet so. We should not be surprised: God is who he is, whether or not we find the details easy to understand.

Easily understood or not, the truth of the Trinity, three persons in one God, is vital to understanding how God can give himself as eternal life to us. Jesus, the Father, and the Spirit, are all one God. God wants us, human beings who follow Jesus, to share in his unity. Jesus prays to his Father these words:

The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, [John 17:22]

To make it happen, the Father sends to us the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus:

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. [John 14:26]

And yet this same sending of the Spirit is not just an act of the Father, it is also an act of Jesus himself:

When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. [John 15:26]

Jesus sends the Spirit to be with us and be in us:

This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. [John 14:17]

This gift of the Holy Spirit is eternal:

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. [John 14:16]

Let’s put this together. God sends to us himself, God the Holy Spirit, to live in us and to be with us forever. He is sent to us from God the Father and by God the Father. He is sent to us by, and in the name of Jesus, who is God the Son. Through God the Spirit, living with and in us, we share in God’s being, his unity, through the unity of the Spirit with Jesus and with the Father. This, then, is eternal life: God gives himself to us, to make us one as God himself is one.

What, then, are we to do with all this? My advice is simple. in Jesus, God offers us himself. Say Yes to the offer. Learn what Jesus is like. Listen to him. Follow him. Trust him. He will do the rest. God will be ours forever, and we his. We will never exhaust his goodness.