Sensitive to the Heart Issues

2001

You were asking about things that they want to do. I know with my son there are things he wants to do and I might let him do those things. But also having things that maybe he wouldn’t have thought of himself. With things that they want to do, what seems like would come into play is that they’re looking at it with rose-colored glasses. Once they actually get into it and find out that pursuing this thing was a little more costly than they thought it was. At least you can refer back and say, “Remember, you wanted to do this,” and hold them to it and not just let them quit when it starts becoming tough. But you can at least use the fact that they said they wanted to do this.

When it’s something they don’t want to do, you can’t bring that back to their attention, because it was your idea that they do this. But when it is their idea and it starts getting costly and they want to quit. Anything that is worth anything will be costly, and they probably will be tempted to bail out of it. And we shouldn’t have the carnal sympathy to let them start and stop things depending on how they feel about it on any given day, but the discipline of following through on something even if it proved to be a little more costly than they thought it was going to be when they first wanted to get into it.

It seems like they will enjoy whatever they’re good at. They’ll start off with great intentions, whether it be golf or whatever. And if they’re good at it, naturally good at it right off the bat, they like it, they enjoy it, and they will keep doing it. If they’re not good at it, “Well, I don’t like golf.”

You talked about work ethics, a heart for the battle in that case because that comes up constantly. When someone is not good at it immediately they don’t want to do it. Whether it’s reading for some or sports for others. They won’t tell you they’re not good at it, but you know that’s the reason. “I don’t like this. This is a waste of time, a waste of money. Why does anybody like this?” The work ethic is part of that. How do you address it?

I think you know. When you see that, those are the kinds of things you talk about. You try to get at the heart of the matter. “Why is it you really don’t like this? Are you embarrassed? Is it because people are watching you and you feel like you’re failing and you have your ego in it? You understand these things are things that break God’s heart. We can’t be driven in any way by our egos or by fear of men or anything like that. Do you sense these things in your own heart?”

The process of sensitizing each other and our children to the things of the heart is what gives us the capacity to hear God, respond to God, obey God, repent. If we can’t see it, if it’s invisible to us because we’re dazed and insensitive, then we’re just going to go through life with the priorities of men and waste our lives. Just the process of talking about it and sensitizing each other to the mysteries and the issues of the heart and calling each other to let God be the standard rather than the way men think of things -- that has a ton of value. Just the conversation itself is 90% of the solution. They have to provide the heart to change and to evaluate it God’s way and to choose God’s way over man’s way. They have to add that. They have to bring that to the table, but our part is to help sensitize them to the issues of the heart that most people are too dull to see. They spend their whole lives building the wrong way and they never see it.