Today begins the conversation about a new vice, anger. Anger, specifically what makes you angry, is a window into your heart that shows you what you love. It’s a good day for self-inventory. What’s in your heart?
All of us have a resource in common – one that we don’t feel like we have enough of – time. All of our resources are meant to held with open hands before God. Even our time is something holy, a gift to us from God that we’re to use and steward in certain ways.
For most of the vices, you know when you’ve gone past the limit. But with greed, it can be hard to tell. How much is enough? How much is too much? Or put another way, how much should we give and how much do we keep?
If greed is hording resources because we think the resource is scarce, then greed means far more than hording money. There are all sorts of greed that infect the heart. Then only answer to assuage a greedy heart is to experience something that has a free and endless supply.
The Christian life isn’t something we can put on hold. There is no pause button and no sense in which we can take a break from pursuing a relationship with God. In the Christian life, we cannot be lazy in the spiritual disciplines or fill our lives with other distractions. Why? Gregory of Nyssa explains, “Stopping in the race of virtue begins the race of evil.”
What's the answer to sloth/laziness? We need grace to wake up to the places where we've fallen asleep to God.
Sloth, or laziness, is far more dangerous than we think. It’s not being a couch potato; it’s a resistance to the transforming work of God. In can look like apathy...or like busyness that distracts you from the cry of your heart to draw close to God.
Sometimes in pride, we do a lot of good things, even spiritual things, in our own strength for our own purposes. How much of what you do is for you instead of God?
If all you do is try to change your behavior, you’re treating symptoms and ignoring a deeper kind of sickness in your heart - pride and fear. How does the gospel speak to what’s really going on in you?
Pride is subtle. It’s subversive. It makes you blind to the real condition of your heart so that you not only can’t see yourself accurately, you can’t accurately gauge the consequences of your actions either. In a lot of ways, we aren’t living in reality because of pride.
Let’s consider the vice of pride. In Thomas Aquinas’ day, it was considered the worst because all the other vices were connected to pride. From Adam and Eve, it rolls down to us. The only difference between Adam and Eve and us is that we've made an art out of pride.
The Proverbs are about consistently living with the life that God has created, a virtuous life. A vicious life would be the life of vice. Vices are those deeply embedded character traits in the heart that have been habit formed. These are a part of what we would call the hidden heart.
The New Testament writers saw Proverbs as more than just poetry in which wisdom is personified. They saw wisdom personified in Jesus Christ.
Today is an intentional pause on going through the Proverbs to stop and address the heart and wisdom in Proverbs. Let’s connect it to this current situation that we're going through. In Psalms, this would be a selah, which means take a breath or reflect.
In You Are What You Love, James K. Smith wrote, “Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love.” How then do you change your heart? The heart must have something to cling to. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is the expulsive power of a new one. In other words, the only way that your heart will change is to find something more attractive and more beautiful.
We can’t will ourselves into better behavior. It's too hard. Solomon says in Proverbs that it's not about obedience, it's about the heart. Whatever the ultimate love is in your heart, that's going to affect your desires, beliefs, emotions and the choices that you'll make. These choices over a period of time will form your character.
As Christians, you and I are very application oriented. But what happens when a person has so many sources of application in their life that they’re trying to apply all at the same time? My suspicion is if that’s who you are, you're about an inch deep and a mile wide in your faith.
What if the warning in Proverbs to not take even one step onto the path of the wicked is serious business? What if one step becomes another, then another? And what if it’s not BIG DEAL evil that everyone can see. What if it’s just the anger or contempt you hold in your heart and grind on sometimes? Where does that path go? Nowhere good.
What we want to do is look at Proverbs as a whole not in individual little verses like each proverbs is a fortune cookie promise from God. What might you be holding on to that’s not really a biblical promise to you? Do you have hidden expectations in your heart about how God should act in response to you?
When Solomon asked the Lord for wisdom, he also asked that his heart be able to discern between right and wrong. He had the law of God, why wasn’t it enough to simply follow that? Because the decisions we so often have to make require more than just applying a rule; we have to understand, to discern, how to apply it wisely.
