An Invitation to Reconstruction

Complete. Intact. Unbroken. Undivided. Whole.

I’m sure you’ll agree that there is something very attractive about these words. Even just sitting there alone on the page without any context they manage to convey health and fullness. They depict how things are meant to be.

And, like me, I suspect you would love these words to be true of you.

The Bible has different ways of describing what goes on inside us at the deepest level of our being. There’s the word ‘conscience’, for instance, the part of us that knows what it is to be either clean or dirty on the inside. A further inner world is conveyed by the word ‘heart’. It portrays the seat of our personalities and the sum total of our internal motivating engine.

I want to take you on a guided tour through one Bible book’s penetrating analysis of another internal condition we each live with: ‘double-mindedness’, as diagnosed in the epistle of James.

We know what it’s like to be in two minds about something. We’ve all stood in a shop trying to choose between pairs of shoes, or coats or new phones. We weigh up big decisions all the time in choosing between alternatives: a school, a house, a career. This is normal. It’s what it means to be finite creatures with incomplete knowledge of the ultimate good as we feel our way forwards on the path of life.

But the fact that we are capable of going in more than one direction has a darker hue when it comes to our character. Everyone reading these lines will know what it is like to say and do things that can leave us, on the other side of our words and actions, utterly bewildered about where those choices came from. How could we have been so stupid, so selfish? What on earth made us speak like that? Creatures we may be, made in God’s image, but sin renders us absurd even to ourselves.

Digging deeper, we know that no one else can see what goes on inside our heads, and so we live with truths about us that only we can comprehend. We are the solitary observers of our inner CCTV. Sometimes this means there are things we are anxious to keep hidden. Often it means there are things we love which somehow say more about the real us than others can discern on the surface. Always it means there is a kind of fault line running through our personalities, a fracture at our core, which means that what we project is not the full story. We are so often less than who we wish we were.

According to the Bible, we are split down the middle.

So, I want to introduce you to James’ painful-but-profound medicine for healing the divided heart. It is a lovingly prescribed course in wholeness. Not just ‘spiritual’ wholeness, as if the spiritual side of our lives were separate from the physical, emotional or relational aspects of who we are. The picture James paints is one that integrates every part of our lives, before God and in relationship with others. He portrays a Christian life of beauty and moral fitness, a cohesive uprightness to our character, that displays the glory and goodness of God to those around us. It is profoundly attractive, and I want to captivate you as you gaze.

Make no mistake, James’ words can cut like a knife. But he is only ever wounding in order to heal. This beautiful book in the Bible can put us together again and lead us part of the way back to who we were always meant to be.

See how God pulls us apart in order to make us whole.

David Gibson's new book, Radically Whole: Gospel Healing for the divided heart, publishes this month. It's a searing invitation to let Scripture transform us - to become the person God invites us, in Christ, to be. You can order your copy now, or if you can't wait, check out David's other book Destiny: Learning to Live by Preparing To Die.