Reality and the Heart: The Heavy Work Of Internal Honesty

The verse of the day was James 3:13:

“Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.”

For some reason, this seemed like a great place to start my search for why following God’s better way is so dang hard for me to do.

After a word study of the Greek and Hebrew meanings, I summarized the actual message of the verse like this:.

When your life is built upon God’s truth, you see the world through a Kingdom lens that helps you distinguish truth from lies. As your perspective changes, the way you walk through life changes as well. Your daily choices begin to benefit others because they are no longer driven by selfish ambition.

As I was studying the verse, I caught myself thinking that the truth I was supposed to discern was primarily “out there”—sorting through the world, other people, and everything around me.

But that’s not what God was revealing to me.

His concern is the heart.

The first truth wisdom helps me discern is what’s happening within me.

If I don’t learn to discern truth from the lies in my own heart, I can easily convince myself that selfish ambition is actually godly zeal. Being wise means having the humility to admit my limitations and allow God’s Word to expose my true motives.

That led to another question:

How do you catch a lie in your own heart?

The first thing I learned is that feelings can be useful warning signs that something deserves closer examination.

When I become defensive, I can ask, Am I defending the truth right now, or do I just want to be right?

When I feel bitterness or resentment, instead of searching for flaws in the other person to justify my feelings, I can ask whether the harder truth is that I’m jealous because I want something they have.

When I find myself calculating what I can gain from a situation, I can ask whether there’s a hidden agenda driving my decisions.

Looking honestly at my motives isn’t easy. My mind naturally wants to cast me as either the hero or the victim in every story. I have to remain open to God’s correction, and that can be uncomfortable.

But exposing what was in my heart didn’t give me the power to change it.

And it left me wondering:

Why am I so strongly pulled toward selfish ambition in the first place?

What am I actually trying to get?