[TruthTalk] Re:The 'Beyond Within' and The Way of Jesus

[Lance Muir]

'Watch over your hearts with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life.' Proverbs 4:23   We live from our heart.   The part of us that drives and organizes our life is not the physical. This remains true even if we deny it. You have a spirit within you and it has been formed. This is true of everyone.   The human spirit is an inescapable fundamental aspect of every human being; and it takes on whichever character it has from the experiences and the choices that we have lived through or made in our past. That is what it means for it to be 'formed'.   Our life and how we find the world now and in the future is, almost totally, a simple result of what we have become in the depths of our being--in our spirit, will, or heart. From there we see our world and interpret reality. From there we make our choices, break forth into action, try to change our world. We live from our depths--most of which we do not understand.   "Do you mean," some will say, "that the individual and collective disasters that fill the human scene are not imposed upon us from without? That they do not just happen to us?"   Yes. That is what I mean. In today's world, famine, war, and epidemic are almost totally the outcome of human choices, which are expressions of the human spirit. Though various qualifications and explanations are appropriate, that is in general true.   Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our 'spiritual' side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the Grace of God, foresse, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying "Why?"   Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have--the greatest need of collective humanity--is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.