Joel 2:12-13a

…return to me [the LORD] with all your heart…Rend your heart and not your garments. (Joel 2:12, 13a)

Rend my heart. But what if I feel like I rip and rend and the heart still rings with hollow resonance of rock?

Hundreds of years later, John Donne ink-prayed in his Fourteenth Sonnet:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I’ve echoed that. For “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Rom. 7:15). Batter my heart, Lord!!! Break me, fill me, free me, rescue me… “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death! Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24). I (and perhaps too much “I”) know that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling [our job]—for it is God who works in you to will and to do [his job] (Phil. 2:13). We are to “put off your old self [our job]… to be made new in the attitude of our minds [okay, Lord, that’s your job] and to put on the new self [our job again!], created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness [that’s God’s work]” (Eph. 4:22-24). I just seem helpless to do my part sometimes. Batter my heart, three-person’d God!!!!

I’m desperate. I want God to break through. I want to know him more. What more can I do to rend my heart? What more can I do to batter down its walls?

Part of that, I believe, is healthy and part of Paul’s spiritual training (1 Cor. 9:25; 1 Tim. 4:8) and his “straining toward what is ahead, I press toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13b-14). Sometimes, I wonder though—am I too desperate? As Richard Lovelace writes (my paraphrase): too little prayer shows a lack of trust; too much prayer shows a lack of trust.

In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it….Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! (Is. 30:15, 18)

Sometimes, I think my desperate prayer for God to batter my heart discloses doubt and impatience, failure to be quiet before him, negligence to bow before him and let him do his work. Not my work, and not in my time. 

It is finished.

It is finished.

 I am his, and he is mine. He will not leave me incomplete. No one can snatch me out of his hand. He will have his way. I need not fear he has forgotten me or put me by the wayside and will not work in my heart. I respond to his winds—sometimes breezes, sometimes storms—of grace. He is breathing flesh into this heart of mind. He knows my heart and he is the Master Teacher. He knows what I can bear and He will be faithful to do it. Christ has paid far too high a cost to leave me.

He will keep you strong to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful. (1 Cor. 1:8-9)  

 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it. (1 Thes. 5:23-24)