Renovation of the Heart
Radical Evil in the Ruined Soul (1|4)
Pages 41-45
• Evil Now a Noncategory
• Soul Ruin Seen in a Church
• And beyond the Church
TOGETHER read the devotional and the scripture.
INDIVIDUALLY take notes in your journal on what stands out.
James 3:13-18 (NIV) 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. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
1 Peter 4:16-17 (NIV) However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?
TOGETHER pray for one another.
INDIVIDUALLY answer the questions in your journal - process your devotional notes and pray.
”C.S. Lewis said: There are no ordinary people. You never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
What is your response to this statement?
“G.K. Chesterton said: the hardest thing to accept in the Christian religion is the greatest value it places upon the individual soul. Still, older Christian writers used to say that God has hidden the majesty of the human soul from us to prevent our being ruined by vanity. - This explains why even in its ruined condition, a human being is regarded by God as something immensely worth saving. Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost.”
Do you accept the idea that human beings apart from God are ruined? How do you describe that ruin? What does it mean in practical, day-to-day terms?
Evil Now a Noncategory
“In our present thought world, the horror is ‘hidden,’ ‘Sin’ as a condition of the human self is not available as a principle of explanation for others who are supposed to know why life goes as it does and to guide others. - Those who are supposed to know are lost in speculations about ‘causes,’ while the real sources of our failures line in choice and the factors at work in it. Choice is where sin dwells.”
What is your sense of how evil functions (or does not function) among “informed” people today as a legitimate category of explanation of events around us?
“The only solution we know to human problems today is ‘education.’ - But what kind of education? - Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.”
Paul’s grandfather Leonard Boucher (1923 - 2017) only received what is equivalent to an eighth-grade education in 1936. He was a humble dairy farmer who coined the phrase “educated idiots” in response to political issues. Has the world become full of “educated idiots?” How has the world devalued the heart and elevated the thoughts of the mind in regard to what is and is not evil?
Soul Ruin Seen in a Church
“In the language of Peter (1 Peter 4:17) For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household; and if it begins with us. It is there we see soul ruin at its greatest. If we can’t simply do what is right there, where can we?”
Where can you see evidence of soul ruin in our wider world and in the “visible church”?
And beyond the Church
“Socrates tried to deal with the realities of the souls of Athens and was killed for it. This is the customary fate of the ‘prophet.’ As author Vance Havner (1901 - 1986) used to say, ‘Jesus was not crucified for saying, “Behold the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin,” but for saying, “Behold the Pharisees, how they steal.’”
What is your response to this statement?
EXTRA READING:
“Praying scripture is not judged by how much you read but by the way in which you read. If you read quickly, it will benefit you little. You will be like a bee that merely skims the surface of a flower. Instead, in this new way of reading prayer, you must become as the bee that penetrates into the depths of the flower. You plunge deeply within to remove its deepest nectar.”
- Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon (1648 - 1717)