The Heart Reader
Series: Life After the Wedding, part 6
Wildwind Community Church
February 26, 2006
David Flowers
Big thought for today: If God wants marriages to be healthy, and if marriages are the product of a union between two spirit beings (which we are if you believe human beings have spirits), and if each spirit is eternal, then is it any wonder that marriage is supposed to last forever? Isn’t that consistent with who we are at the core? Doesn’t it make sense of the sex thing we talked about last week – the way sex seems to reach right down into the human soul and spirit? Is it possible that adultery actually begins with something that goes wrong in one or both spirits – something that has gone wrong a long time before the affair – heck, something that has gone wrong a long time before the marriage?
That’s where I want to start with you today, picking up where we left off last week, only today I want to get away from the more sexual aspects and focus on heart issues. Because if my idea is right – if adultery begins with something that goes wrong in the human spirit before the wedding day, then we can do nothing greater than to pay close attention to matters of spirit this morning.
I read a book several years ago by an anonymous author. It was called The Heart Reader. The main character in the book awakes one morning to find himself capable of reading the emotions of those around him. Though he had always wanted this power, he quickly wishes he had not acquired it. He immediately becomes aware of the fact that every man and woman is existing on a level completely different inside than what would appear on the outside. He hears the pain of the waitress serving him at the restaurant. He hears the fear of the big burly biker. He hears the loneliness of the party animal and the doubt of the preacher. He finds himself in a world completely different than the one he thought he lived in. Though initially freaked out and depressed by this gift, he soon realizes that it is in fact a gift and begins to go around helping people based not on how they present themselves, but based on who he really knows them to be. He says encouraging words to the waitress to soothe her pain. He attempts to reassure the fearful biker. He tries to come alongside the party animal and be a real friend, and makes himself available to listen to the doubts of the preacher. Some respond well to his efforts, but many do not. Many refuse to acknowledge the realities that are inside of them and respond by lashing out, walking away, or making fun. He eventually loses this gift, but what he never loses is the perspective it gave him on who people really are.
As we wrap up our series on marriage today, I want to do my best to impart this gift to you. I want to encourage you to think below the surface about this issue of marriage. I want you to think about your spouse. I want you to imagine what you might hear if you could suddenly read their heart.
So you receive this gift – this strange ability - suddenly at work one day. After spending the day “getting to know” your coworkers, you return home. And there, for the first time, you really hear your spouse. I mean, you hear not words, not even actions – you hear their heart. For the first time, you realize her, “Honey, does this make me look fat,” actually means “I’m feeling insecure and I need your reassurance that you love me no matter what.” For the first time you realize that his stony silence means, “I’m afraid I can’t make you happy and that no matter what I say I’m going to humiliate myself or hurt your feelings.” For the first time in quite a while, when he approaches you for sex, you hear, “I love you and want to be close to you.” For the first time, when you want to go out with the guys and she angrily objects, you hear, “I would give anything to be the person you would choose to spend your time with. What’s the matter with me?” For the first time when he gets angry and throws a tantrum, you hear “I’m not really angry – I’m hurt. But it’s too embarrassing to tell you that, and I’m not sure it’s safe.”
You are suddenly hearing your partner in a whole new way – you hear their heart reaching out to you. And you know what happens? It disarms you. It forces you to stop being suspicious, stop being defensive, stop being critical, stop stonewalling, stop being contemptuous, and perhaps for the first time see your spouse not as a need-meeter, not as a parent, not as a roommate, but as a profoundly spiritual being – a person with infinite depth and complexity who is sometimes – and sometimes frequently – lost in their own depths. A spirit being crying out from behind a physical body, longing to make contact with you but unsure how.
You begin to smile as you think about how obsessed you used to be with spiritual mysteries. Are there ghosts – “disembodied spirits”? If so are they trying to make contact with us? How do we know? For the first time you realize that the far greater and more urgent problem is how billions of spirits with bodies – living human beings – are walking around every day in those bodies, unable to make contact even with those closest to them. You can hear them now – crying out and not being heard. What about all these people who are not bodiless shadows but real flesh and blood who are nonetheless living invisible lives? It occurs to you that sometimes the greatest problem when you’re a spirit is not having a body, and the greatest obstacle to living in a body is this pesky spirit that keeps reaching out beyond your body to send signals. Body or no-body – we’re having problems making contact. Ghosts rattle doors and slam shutters and flip lights off and on. Those of us with bodies raise our voices, and cry, and hope just one more point will be the one that lands. Ghosts send signals and hope someone is listening. So do we, and I wonder if things are more like the 6th Sense than we might imagine – that maybe it’s hard to know which side you’re on. Bruce Willis didn’t know he was dead. I think sometimes it’s easy to mistake death for life. Someone wise once wrote that.
Proverbs 16:25 (NLT)
25 There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death.
Everything is not as it seems. Humans and animals may have the same sexual equipment, but sex between humans could not be more different than sex between animals. When people are involved, there’s always something under the hood – that spirit thing. All is not as it appears. We can be going along in this world thinking everything is great, thinking all is exactly as it appears, and find suddenly that we have been on a death-course all along.
You see all this now for the first time because you were given a gift, allowing you to see what you were not able to see before. For a few days you could see below the surface – you could see what actually IS, not just what things seem to be. After a few days, the gift disappears. But it rocks your world, changes you forever. You never use words lightly again. You never dismiss someone’s off-the-cuff cry for help again. You never again assume others have it together more than you do. If you are a Christian, you never again automatically assume that others want what you have. And you never again automatically assume that they don’t.
I’m convinced that if you begin to see yourself and your spouse (and everyone in the world) as a spirit being – an embodied spirit – it will keep you from the mistake of thinking it’s all about fixing the other person. In truth it’s about two spirits made by God somehow finding each other and being able to actually make contact. Think of it that way and you can begin to forget who’s right and who’s wrong, and you can start remembering that once upon a time you stood together in a church or courthouse and your spirits reached out for each other. God created your spirit to last forever. God created your partner’s spirit to last forever. Therefore, God created marriage to be a bond that is never broken on earth except by death. And no matter what circumstances we face, we must guard that bond at all times.
I wanted to get you thinking on a spirit level about your marriage today. I wanted to get you away from the pettiness and disagreements and hostility and get you thinking about one another as spirit beings. See The Heart Reader is a fictional story, but once upon a time a heart-reader really lived. The heart-reader knew the deepest longings and pain of everyone He met. Whether hurt in the heart of a prostitute, repentance in the heart of a thief, or pride in the heart of an arrogant religious teacher, Jesus knew the human heart, the human spirit.
John 2:23-25 (NIV)
23 Now while he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name.
24 But Jesus would not entrust himself to them, for he knew all men.
25 He did not need man’s testimony about man, for he knew what was in a man.
Jesus knew the human heart. Remember what he said?
Mark 7:20-23 (MSG)
20 He went on: "It’s what comes out of a person that pollutes:
21 obscenities, lusts, thefts, murders, adulteries,
22 greed, depravity, deceptive dealings, carousing, mean looks, slander, arrogance, foolishness—
23 all these are vomit from the heart. There is the source of your pollution."
Jesus knew and understood the human heart.
Matthew 15:18-19 (NASB)
18 "But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man.
19 "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders.
Jesus knew and understood the human heart.
Matthew 9:22 (NLT)
22 Jesus turned around and said to her, "Daughter, be encouraged! Your faith has made you well." And the woman was healed at that moment.
Jesus knew the human heart. He was an expert in diagnosing things of the heart. Jesus was a heart reader. And do you know what? He has called us to be heart readers too. You wanna know where in the Bible he calls us to be heart-readers?
John 15:12 (MSG)
12 This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.
There it is – Christ’s call to be a heart-reader. How was Jesus able to love so deeply, so thoroughly? Because Jesus loved with understanding of what was happening in the human heart. My friends, the more we learn to see each other as spirit beings, to look under the hood like Jesus always did, the more we will become heart readers. The more we become heart readers the better we will learn to love each other, and that is what Jesus told us to do. How do we become heart readers?
2 Corinthians 7:1 (NIV)
1 . . .let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.
As holiness is perfected in our lives, we will become more like God – more like Jesus. That means our love will become more like the love God has. We will come to see others the way God sees them. We’ll increasingly be heart-readers, more and more capable of loving the way God loves. That’s why this perfecting of holiness is precisely what your marriage needs.
I want to close this series by assuming that you are interested in having an affair-proof marriage, that it is your desire to learn to be a heart reader, to learn to love your spouse the way Jesus told us to learn to love. With that assumption I want to give you a few practical tips for keeping your marriage adultery-free, assuming of course that you’re interested in doing that. A lot of people want to flirt with moral danger in their lives and then, when they fall across that line of moral failure, they want to say, “How did this happen? I never meant for this to happen.” If you’re on the fence, toying with it, patronizing temptation, none of this will help you.
For the rest of you, I want to help you draw a few safe lines to help you stay far from adultery, my friends. We began with a video that shows you how it happens, how fine the line is, how easy it could happen to you. What follows are my personal guidelines and I think they are dictated by prudence and wisdom! Call them over-conservative. Call them paranoid. Say that I don’t trust myself enough. Make light of them however you wish. If your goal is to see how close you can get to the moral line without falling over it, by all means skirt these suggestions. But if your goal is to draw safe margins for yourself to protect both yourself and your marriage, here are some guidelines.
1. Don’t share things with other people of the opposite sex that you don’t share with your spouse. Women, do not take another man into your confidence to be your close friend and the shoulder you cry on. Guys, do not justify what you’re doing by saying that she’s just so easy to talk to. If you can’t talk to your spouse, fix that problem – but do not become the confidante of someone of the opposite sex, or make one of that person.
2. Do not have relationships with people of the opposite sex whom your partner is uncomfortable with. If your spouse doesn’t want you hanging around so and so, you should stop hanging around with so and so. Don’t justify it. Don’t argue. Respect your spouse’s feelings. If you find yourself being the disapproving spouse, be gentle. If your spouse has never given you a reason not to trust them, be careful when communicating your concerns so that you do not seem accusatory. Guys, you need to hear it from another guy – we are usually clueless when a woman is hitting on us. We are not relational geniuses like most of our wives are. Women, don’t assume your intuition is always accurate because that can lead you to be accusatory and create a hostile environment for communication, but fellas, let’s face it. Most of the time she’s probably on to something. Listen to her. Respect her wishes. And women, if your husband doesn’t want you hanging around with some dude, you need to respect that too.
3. Don’t think that because you are a Christian you are immune to sexual disaster. The ones least immune are the ones who believe they are immune. They will be the first to fall. No one who ever met with moral failure said, “I have an idea – I’m going to make myself vulnerable to an affair.” As you saw in the video, you never know what circumstances you can end up in.
4. Don’t be a fool. You know what’s right and wrong. You have a conscience. Don’t allow rationalization to work overtime to convince you that it’s okay to confide in that person, to hang around all the time with them, to share too much of yourself.
Ecclesiastes 10:3 (NIV)
3 Even as he walks along the road, the fool lacks sense and shows everyone how stupid he is.
People can spot a fool because a fool walks like a fool. Foolishness will show itself for what it is. Isn’t it funny how people involved in affairs always think it’s a big secret, when pretty much everyone around them knows? People are so obvious, aren’t they? I mean really – you pretty much know who’s sleeping with who around the office, right? Forrest Gump was no Jesus Christ, but one thing’s for sure – stupid is as stupid does. The point here is that others can see your rationalizations and they know if you’re leaning toward an affair, or actually having one. Don’t allow what everyone else can see to be hidden from your sight. Don’t be a fool.
5. Think about the future. What would happen if you took that step? Who would be hurt? How would you pick your life up again?
6. Do not reveal to someone of the opposite sex the following information:
a. That your marriage is in trouble
b. Negative stuff about your spouse (consider not revealing this stuff to those of the same sex either)
c. That you think they are physically attractive
7. Do your very best not to be alone with someone of the opposite sex, especially for extended time. Had those folks in the video we saw simply had someone else around, none of this would ever have happened. Which leads to my last suggestion:
8. Like the man in the video, build openness and accountability into your marriage. That guy is gonna go home and tell his wife what happened. He is the one who was seduced, but in all truth, he opened some doors for her that didn’t have to be opened. He told her he found her attractive. He allowed the conversation to go where it went. The easiest thing in the world for him to do would be to keep this a secret so as not to have to own up to his responsibility. Ladies, you know the facts here. Though we were all delighted that he didn’t actually go all the way with this woman, he’s not exactly going to get points from his wife for that is he? She’ll be upset that he allowed some of those doors to open, and he’ll have to bear that responsibility. But ultimately she’ll also come to trust him more because he came home and told her, which assures her that his heart is in the right place and he will continue to keep his vows to her.
John 3:20-21 (MSG)
20 Everyone who makes a practice of doing evil, addicted to denial and illusion, hates God-light and won’t come near it, fearing a painful exposure.
21 But anyone working and living in truth and reality welcomes God-light so the work can be seen for the God-work it is."
Accountability to your spouse sheds light, helps to make sure you’re not living in denial and illusion. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. That’s why you must remain accountable to your spouse. If you do or say something ignorant and open a door for someone to move in on you, coming clean to your spouse will have consequences, but not coming clean will ultimately have far greater ones. That same ignorance and naivety may get you again later, only next time you might not escape with your vows intact.
Now I want to speak briefly to those spouses who are on the receiving end of one of these revelations. If your spouse tells you someone at work is after them, or they got themselves into a tight spot at the office party, this will be hard to hear. It’s very important that you do your best to not make your spouse regret telling you. Ladies if, for example, your husband tells you that a woman at work tried to seduce him, seek the reassurance you need. But realize he’s probably telling you because he DOES love you, and he’s NOT interested in an affair. I mean, it seems to me the very best way for a man to keep an affair from happening is to tell his wife, and he knows that! If you allow fear and insecurity to run away with you, and begin to nag him and pester him and call his office 40 times a day, he’ll be much less likely to feel comfortable being accountable to you any longer, and then you’re both in great danger and so is your marriage. It’s not easy to go to a spouse with this kind of information, and it is definitely not easy to be the spouse who receives it.
So there are some tips for you. They are my guidelines and I follow them pretty consistently so you can’t say it doesn’t work in the real world. I encourage you to follow the path of wisdom. Today we have looked closely at the underlying spiritual reality of marriage – two embodied spirits attempting to make and maintain contact with each other. We’ve looked at how radically our marriages and other relationships could change if we learned to see one another this way – to be heart readers. We saw that Jesus was a heart reader and that he will make us heart readers as we come to see one another the way he sees us (primarily as spirit beings), and that he will help us love the way he does, perfecting holiness in our lives out of reverence for God. And finally we looked at some practical tips for staying far from the line of moral failure.
In conclusion of both this message and this series, when it comes to affair-proofing your marriage, be sure to remember what I have been telling you that is so important: always look at yourself. Always focus on your words, your actions. A person will almost never stray from a marriage where his/her spouse is committed to improving him/herself, willing to apologize when wrong, and allowing God to perfect holiness in their life. If you are truly being that kind of spouse, chances are good you’ll have nothing to worry about.
