There are some characteristics and attributes that seem obviously desirable. Take, for example, the quality of steadiness. When a person is ‘steady’ it suggests that they are reassuringly solid. Steadiness speaks of reliability. It speaks of consistency. It says this person can be trusted. Things don’t throw them. They aren’t easily unsettled. Steadiness almost seems as if it could function as a working definition of maturity.
The person who is steady might be contrasted with those who are flighty and volatile. People who are prone to swings of emotion. That’s the kind of thing we attribute to children – to the immature. Not to those who are mature and stable and robust. Not to those who are steady.
But what if things aren’t quite as they seem? What if steadiness has a darker side? What if even-keel unflappability isn’t the desirable quality we always assumed?
Sometimes, often unexpectedly, something in Scripture just grabs our attention. One verse in Psalm 119 did that for me recently. Tucked in the middle of the longest psalm, it identifies a contrast between the wicked and the godly:
Their hearts are callous and unfeeling,
but I delight in your law.
(Psalm 119:70)
I know what you’re thinking. That this hasn’t grabbed you by the throat. That it isn’t the most dramatic of verses. Bear with me.
Callous and unfeeling translates a word meaning fattened. It has the sense, almost, of flabby. Hearts cloaked with fat. Hearts that are insulated, walled off, inaccessible. Fattened hearts are, in that sense, insensible. Hence the English translation of callous. Something like a labourer’s hands where the skin has become so thickened by manual work that any sensitivity to gentle touch is almost entirely lost.
The same word – and idea – is found in Isaiah 6. God commissions the prophet telling him to go and ‘make the heart of this people calloused (it’s that word fattened); make their ears dull and close their eyes’ (Isaiah 6:10). And then we find that this is the passage Jesus quotes to explain why he teaches the people in parables (Matthew 13:13-15).
You see parables are supposed to move us. They are supposed to unsettle us. I’ve heard them likened to stealth bombers that can get in under our defences in order to deliver their payload. All of which means that, in the face of the parables, steadiness would be a problem. Steadiness wouldn’t be good. It would, in this case, suggest spiritual insensitivity. The presence of hearts that are fattened – callous – so that we weren’t responding as we should.
In Psalm 119 there is a different kind of sensitivity at work. A sensitivity to affliction. ‘Before I was afflicted,’ the psalmist writes, ‘I went astray but now I obey your word.’ The psalmist dares to say ‘it was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees’ (Psalm 119:67, 71).
There is, of course, an appropriate confidence which comes from knowing that we have a heavenly Father who cares for us. Jesus speaks about that in Luke 11. But that doesn’t lead to us having hearts that are unresponsive to the things that happen to us and the word that God speaks to us.
Good things are wonderfully good. Bad things are terribly bad. Spiritual gain is much to be prized. Spiritual dullness much to be dreaded. Such things ought to matter to us. When we know how good it is to be united to the one who died for us, we also know how terrible it is to be apart from him. We might say that our hearts become lean. They become unfattened – sensitised to spiritual realities. We feel more intensely. Whatever it is that takes us closer to Christ, even if that is adversity, becomes precious to us. Whatever pulls us away from Christ becomes much to be dreaded.
We aren’t steady. Not if steady means being unmoved by that which is good and untroubled by that which is bad. Spiritual sensitivity means we delight in the things of God – his law, his cross, his glory. The psalmist says ‘I delight in your law’. Not I respect your law (though it’s not less than respect). Nor even I obey your law (though it’s not less than obedience either). But I delight in your law. There is something so very richly personal, so emotionally engaged, about the psalmist’s words.
So, if I can put it like this, can I ask how your unsteadiness is going? When you read the Bible, are you moved? When you engage in conversation, are you passionate? At the very least, are we growing in these things? Are we clear that the maturity we are pursuing is taking us, not toward some kind an unresponsive steadiness, but toward an ever-deepening passion for the glory of our God?
