Who makes the woeful heart to sing

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself.

I didn't have a miserable childhood.  I didn't suffer any overwhelming loss.  I wasn't disliked or unpopular.  I simply chose to devote a gratuitous amount of time and energy to my own bloated insecurities -- to comparing myself to other people and envying them of their confidence.

I remember slipping out of church immediately after services instead of talking with my friends in the foyer, so that they would notice my absence and come looking for me.  I'd sit morosely in corners and scribble melodramatic song lyrics in a duct-taped binder.  I refused and even scoffed at encouragement.

I did a lot of that kind of thing.

In sum, I spent a whole lot of time thinking about myself, which is the very definition of pride.  Even though I didn't feel good about myself, I didn't have a problem thinking only about myself.  Perhaps John Ortberg said it best, that at its deepest level, "pride is the [loveless] choice to exclude both God and other people from their rightful place in our hearts."  Pride is forgetting (or ignoring) the Christian's responsibility to love God and others above self (Mark 12.30-31).  Looking back now, it's painful to recall.  I'm not proud of any of the time I wasted.  I'm not proud of the fact that all of that self-centeredness would ultimately come to a head in miserable dating relationships -- one failure after another, all because I could only think about me.

In Knowing God, J I Packer asserts that when people come to know God truly -- as opposed to simply knowing about Him -- their "losses and 'crosses' cease to matter to them; what they have gained [in Christ] simply banishes these things from their minds."

What I went through certainly wasn't a loss or a cross.  It was my own juvenile selfishness.  However, selfishness is simply the idolatry of self -- the worship of me -- though it will look different for everyone.  For me, it manifested as a "woe is me" type of mentality.  For others, it might be the "I can do no wrong" or "I have all the answers" thought process, or maybe a sense of entitlement.

All of these are symptoms of the same disease -- a disease for which only Christ has the cure.  And although my selfishness wasn't necessarily a loss or a cross, it was still a burden that I carried: the lingering remnant of sin in me that I refused to allow Christ to "banish" from my mind.

One of the things you hear when you're feeling sorry for yourself is the expression of tough love: "Just get over it."  I don't necessarily disagree with the thought, but I'm cautious to express it in that way to people who are struggling through some of the same things I did.  Even if the sentiment is well-intentioned, it can sound immensely callous, and Paul's admonition to believers is that we should always communicate with compassion -- even when it's a hard truth that needs to be told (Eph 4.15).  Packer's purposeful use of the word "banish" is not necessarily that we should just "get over" our weaknesses, but that the surpassing worth of truly knowing Christ should outweigh and eliminate them.  In other words, truly knowing Christ eclipses the value of all the world's trinkets and makes letting go of any degree of hurt possible.

If, instead of hyper-analyzing my faults, I base my understanding of who I am upon who I know Him to be, suddenly I am capable of relinquishing my flaws as weaknesses He can enable me to overcome.  If, instead of being resentful toward God for the struggles in my life, I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving for the fact that He has lifted the debt of sin from my shoulders, it becomes fully possible to drop everything I am holding onto and follow Him immediately.

However, there is a mis-implication in the "just get over it" sentiment.  While the power we access through the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of wiping the slate clean, we still walk in our flesh and live in a world of loss and heartache.  The "letting go" process will vary for each person in terms of length and intensity.  However, the more closely an individual knows Christ, the easier and more direct that process can be.  Perhaps those pains will never fully subside, but my love for Christ and His love for me will make them manageable and secondary -- mere inconveniences instead of the throbbing, unmitigated injuries they were without Him.

There's a well-known hymn that we frequently sing at Fellowship Bible Church.  It's a composition that particularly highlights Jesus' sovereign authority over nature, His surpassing glory, and His matchless worth to the individual.  It beautifully paints the idea of a big-picture, limitless, omnipotent God who is also intensely personal.

Fairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of all nature
O Thou of God and man the Son
Thee will I cherish, Thee will I honor
Thou, my soul’s glory, joy, and crown

Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands
Robed in the blooming garb of spring
Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer
Who makes the woeful heart to sing

Fair is the sunshine, fairer still the moonlight
And all the twinkling starry host
Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer
Than all the angels heaven can boast

All fairest beauty, heavenly and earthly
Wondrously, Jesus, is found in Thee
None can be nearer, fairer, or dearer
Than Thou, my Savior, art to me

Beautiful Savior! Lord of all the nations!
Son of God and Son of Man!
Glory and honor, praise, adoration
Now and forever more be Thine

I typically draw the congregation's attention to the second verse.  Often when we find ourselves in painful, sorrowful places, it's easy to allow other things to become our solace.  Solitude.  Natural beauty.  Earthly relationships.  Time.  Even the distraction of entertainment.  And yet Jesus, the One who is fairer and purer than all of these things, is the one who is truly capable of causing woeful hearts to sing.  His eternal, faithful character should be our comfort and our consolation above all else this world can offer.

As a teenager, Jesus was never my consolation -- though I might have claimed He was, though I might even have called out in the midst of my frustrations and anxieties for Him to remove them from me.  I found cheap consolation in my friends' sympathy or simply in distraction -- videogames, books, TV, phone conversations.  And yet the person of Jesus -- the man who lived and died sinlessly on my behalf, the God who ordained my finite number of breaths and even allowed my emotional insecurities in order to make me realize my need for Him -- is the consolation I should have taken.

Knowing Him causes all my losses and crosses to decrease.  Letting go of hurt, especially hurt gained through the malice or carelessness of others, is only truly possible through the restorative power of overwhelming grace.  Letting go of false notions about self-worth and relinquishing selfishness are only possible through intimately knowing Christ.  He outweighs whatever I may have gained in this life.  He banishes any lingering sense of earthly loss from my heart, promising and proving that those things no longer have any claim upon me.  Temporary sorrow no longer has the opportunity to preoccupy my thoughts now that I am filled with Christ Himself.

None can be nearer, fairer, or dearer.  He makes the woeful heart to sing.

Practically, how do I overcome failure and pride?

There are three basic principles of developing Christian fortitude -- that is, a long-suffering, Kingdom-focused attitude entrenched in the grace of God. 

1. I cannot live in my success
2. I cannot live in my failure
3. I must prioritize eternity over the temporary

An eternal perspective is only possible to maintain when I am not consumed with anger over my current predicament, or when I am not enamored with the experience of life.  But how, practically, do we change perspective?  Is it really as simple as "just getting over it?"

Arrogance and regret are intimately juxtaposed.  They are two sides of the same coin -- a coin called pride.  Let's make no mistake about it: both are applications of inflated self-worth and really are the ultimate forms of self-idolization.

When we are consumed by regret, we are refusing to pull ourselves out of the cesspool of self-pity.  We evaluate our problem as too great for God's grace to handle.  We think our sin is special, something no one else has ever committed or could ever possibly understand.  We think it is our right to be miserable over our shortcomings and mistakes.  We take ownership of them instead of surrendering them to the One who has already taken them upon Himself.

Arrogance functions in the exact same way as its twin, but at the opposite end of the spectrum.  Like self-pity, arrogance is incurably comparative and evaluates everything on the basis of what I've done versus what others have accomplished.  It regards blessings as achievements: the mountaintop on which I stand is a right or an entitlement, something I deserve.  It squashes the needs of others in order to meet the needs of self.  Maybe arrogance is the easier aspect of pride to identify, but both sides of the coin are ultimately only concerned with the coin itself, and not the function for which it was minted.

What I'm getting at is this.  To some blunt degree, the answer is yes: it is as simple as "just getting over it."  In either extreme -- arrogance or regret -- we simply need to stop thinking so highly of ourselves, though it's a goal that is certainly much easier to state than to do.  For that reason, I've come up with three practical R's of "just getting over it" that I think are helpful for narrowing down the specific steps we must take in order to progress in our battles with pride and failure.

Replace

Paul spoke in Colossians 3 about putting on and putting off -- in other words, replacing old behavior with new behavior.  It's not enough to simply stop lying: becoming a truth-teller necessarily requires us to actively speak truth.  When I'm struggling with lust, it's not enough to simply remove an internet connection or end a sinful relationship: maintaining purity requires me to replace lustful thoughts with pure ones and sinful relationships with wholesome ones.  In the same manner, I need to replace obsession over failure with new goals.  I need to repurpose my regret into a glorified object lesson.  Failure is only failure if we don't learn from it.

As it pertains to arrogance, I need to replace the idols I possess of my own ability and success with humility.  I need to reflect on my failures in order to remind myself of the weaknesses I still possess in order to allow Christ's strength to be revealed in those areas.  I need to return to the basic principles of the gospel: that all have sinned and fallen short, and that there is no other name given among men that can produce salvation.  I need to remember that my identity has been replaced with His -- that it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me, and that my old state of being has been replaced by a brand new creation.  I need to remember that my ambition has been replaced with righteousness.  I need to replace self-contentment with dependence on Him.

Re-Focus

The process of re-evaluation means a complete re-orientation of perspective.  When I focus on the present and make my current goals my priority, or obsess over the past and revere the what-ifs as my gods of regret, I make myself the center of my own worldview.  Celebrating my state of affairs is to cross the line from simply being thankful for a temporal blessing to making comfortable living the end of my pursuits.  Regretting the past not only shackles me to self-pity but also presumes that I am the master of my destiny: it halts forward progress.

On the other hand, when I prioritize eternity by making the most of the present via devotion to study of the Word and prayer and living as though my actions have eternal consequences, I return God to the center of my worldview -- to the place He so justly deserves.  Re-focusing my perspective isn't as simple as just looking forward.  It means radical transformation.  It means seeing with new eyes, not just changing my prescription.

Reveal

Perhaps the greatest and simultaneously most underrated tool of Christian living is fellowship.  We take it for granted and assign it to social functions, but fellowship means accountability.  Nothing kills a sinful desire like confessing it to a peer; conversely, nothing feeds a sinful desire like concealing it.  But we don't want anyone to know what we're carrying with us.  Perhaps we fear they won't understand, or worry that maybe they'll judge us.  Maybe we want to just sit in our own pit of self-loathing and feel sorry for ourselves.  And that's the reason why we relegate "fellowship" to meals after a church service: because we're far too proud to utilize the actual benefits it promises.

In order to move on from failure, we need to consciously counteract the tendency to conceal.  If I have guilt weighing me down, I need to confess that to someone who will not only pray for my healing but also positively encourage me in the steps of restoration.  If I am lazy and contented, I need someone who will challenge me to live purposefully, to radically amputate the areas of my life that are causing my nearsightedness.  If I am arrogant because of the things I've accomplished, I need someone to remind me that the only thing I should be boasting in is the work of Christ in my life, because all of my achievements stacked upon one another don't fill the hollow depths of my soul which only God's grace could fill.

Pride is a disease with lots of symptoms: self-pity and arrogance are only two of them.  If there are warning signs of this struggle, then I need to reveal that tendency to someone who will walk in humility alongside me.

~*~

Developing Christian fortitude means living for eternity.

Living for eternity means prioritizing my desire to be with Christ over my desire for the insubstantial things of this world.

Living for eternity means my failures are a moot point and my successes all belong to Christ anyway.

Living for eternity means that my works and the fruit I bear point to His righteousness in me.  It means that the cup of my life runs over with the grace He lavished upon me, a fountain of life of which I am but a conduit, designed to reach into the lives around me.

Living for eternity means living for the Kingdom.

___________________________

Aren't there healthy applications of pride and regret?

The answer is yes, but the margin for error in either category is enormous.

Regret communicates the idea of a poor choice, so if regret is the motivator to never make that same choice again, then yes - it can be positive.  But regret has this way of hanging around and becoming debilitating.  It can sink us into depression or cause us to hesitate at an opportunity to make the same choice again.  In that regard, regret is only positive if it is a motivator to righteousness.  However, a much better motivator to righteousness is the desire to be like Christ, so if regret is the stepping stone we immediately leave behind in order to get across the river, it certainly has a positive function.  Carrying a bag of regrets on my back throughout life, however, is to be consumed with my own failure.

In the same vein, being proud of something is certainly different than being boastful.  There's an appropriate level of recognition of a job well-done or a skill honed through years of practice.  However, an appropriate level of pride is tempered with humility: someone who possesses great skill is fully aware of his imperfections, of a continual need to improve.  In that regard, accepting a compliment for an achievement is not the equivalent of being arrogant.  Arrogance doesn't recognize the need for compliments or the need to improve.