In promoting my latest book, ‘Becoming Wholehearted, a Journey into Authenticity’, I make a big point of the difference between being whole-hearted and being wholehearted. Whole-hearted is an adjective, it describes the sense of buying into something completely. “I whole-heartedly agree” means that I absolutely and totally agree.
Wholeheartedness is something else; wholeheartedness is a state of body, soul and spirit being. It’s a completeness of inner certainty of identity that lacks nothing, no doubts or ifs and buts, no wavering, The Hebrew word, ‘Shalom’ just about covers it, having in its root meaning the sense of wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety, prosperity, and the implication of permanence.
Hopefully that helps to explain it, but that understanding begs a question: How much of what you think and do, your behaviour, ways of reacting, your thoughts about other people, the way you plan and all the everyday stuff of life could you describe as being wholehearted, filled with Shalom?
The truth for most of us is that the way we live and think about things is all based on our experiences in the past. It’s our default, as humans, everything we think and do is premised on our experience, going right back to our earliest childhood. It’s as if we are born with entirely empty heads and then we hoover up every single little thing that happens to us, every word said to us, every good thing and every bad thing and it all becomes the information bank we operate out of from that moment on, it’s all stored in our brains.
There’s a problem with this, and here’s what it is: It doesn’t allow for God. It doesn’t allow for the fact that each one of us was created by God for a purpose and that from the moment we accepted Jesus, we gave up the right to live our lives as we had been doing until then, out of our experience. That was our ‘old man’. Instead, in accepting Jesus, we’ve decided to live our life His way, as a new creation, a ‘new man’.
The phrase “Christ in us, the hope of glory” from Colossians 1:27 isn’t just a spiritual concept, flowery words; it’s a supernatural fact. We invite Jesus into our heart, and He moves in and takes residence. It’s now our choice as to how much of our heart we allow Him to fill. We can continue to live as our ‘old man’, as Romans 7 puts it, or endeavour to become ever more Christlike, making more room in our hearts for Him by giving up our ‘self’.
And so life goes on, with a constant juggling between the ‘old man’ in our heads and the ‘new man’ that Jesus reveals to us as He inhabits our hearts. Learning to do this is the journey of the rest of our lives. It’s a journey of allowing God to replace the lies about ourselves that past experience has led us to believe with His truths and allowing these truths to start informing, influencing and revising what we believe about ourselves and life in our heads. As we grow to know how to relate to ‘Christ within us’ our hearts will inform our heads and we’ll learn to trust and act out of our new self, increasingly responding to life as Jesus would, wholeheartedly.