Behavior Modification Stinks

Somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something bad. Really bad. Honestly, almost every day in my youth and childhood I did something bad. I constantly lied or bent the truth. I stole sweets and treasures. I was envious of siblings who were treated differently. I lusted after things that weren’t mine. I was a bad kid. The family joke was that more wooden spoons were broken over my behind or knuckles than any of the other kids. I spent a cumulative year grounded to my bedroom from ages 10-14. I’m not overstating my badness, it was to the bone.

Somewhere around 15 I absorbed the message that cleaning myself up on the outside would result in goodness inside. I don’t know if the lesson was explicit or implicit, though I have plenty of evidence for it being explicit in the books that circulated our circles, the conferences we all attended, and the company we kept. I began trying to be good. I mean really, really trying. Real white knuckled, sackcloth and ashes, head coverings and homemade dresses, courtship and chastity, prudishness and pride kind of good. I did this for the next fifteen years in various forms.

Various forms is the operative phrase there because, like all white-washed tombs, I would eventually begin to stink inside and would begin another round of reinvention of my goodness. Each time I failed, I’d try, try again. Each time my goodness was unsustainable for longer than a year or two, I’d try another method of winning God’s approval, his love, or even just his like. I’d have settled for his like. I’d have been okay with not really feeling like I mattered much to him, but at least he wasn’t still spanking me with any tool available.

But the spankings continued in various forms, so much so that by the time I was 29, I was done. I was just done. I’ve shared the story of my crisis of faith before and won’t rehash it here, but it was less a crisis of faith, and more a realization that I had no faith in the true God because I didn’t know who the true God was. That’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is sin.

Yesterday I shared a series of images on social media where I talked about the effects of “unhealed and unresolved brokenness,” and in an ensuing conversation on one medium, a commenter said she didn’t think of unhealed and unresolved brokenness as akin to sin.

Ten years ago I heard the phrase, “The heart of the problem is a problem of the heart,” and something clicked for me in a way it never had before. Before I thought the principal thing about sin was the naming of it and the eradicating of it. For example, if one uses pornography or one gossips, the most important first step is to stop using pornography or stop gossiping. After the badness is done away with, then working on the heart can begin. But after hearing that phrase and walking through a discipleship course where its focus is the problem of the heart, I began to think of sin differently.

In Matthew 15:18-20, Jesus says to his disciples, “But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.”

Jesus is saying that what actually defiles, what stinks about a tomb, is what’s on the inside, what’s in the heart. He’s saying that no matter what a person does, in the depth of him (his heart) there is something much more broken. Jesus is principally concerned with the heart being changed, more than the behavior being changed.

This realization might be pedestrian to a lot of folks but it was shocking for me. I felt like an evangelist for it for a few years there because, I mean, can you believe this?! It’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about my actions, but it’s that he cares more about my heart. This changed everything for me and that’s not an exaggeration. It toppled my complete understanding of God’s character, his intention for the world, his love for me, my love for my neighbor, everything. Nothing was left untouched by this. It helped me realize that no matter how much the pornographer or the gossiper cleans up their actions on the outside, if their hearts aren’t radically changed by the goodness, grace, and love of God, they are still not walking in wholeness with him.

Fast-forward a few years and some spiritual formation later, and I began to realize that the problems of the heart are just as important to God in all their complexity as the heart itself.

Here’s what I mean by that. Using the example of pornography or gossip again, the why of the pornography use is what God wants to heal. The why of the gossiping is what God wants to heal. Perhaps someone uses pornography because they want to feel in control, and they want to feel in control because somewhere along the way, their autonomy was infringed upon and something was stolen from them. Left unhealed, that wound festers and grows and morphs into a grasping, angry, objectification of all human bodies made in the image of God and the quick, temporary release of orgasm. For the one who gossips, perhaps somewhere along the way someone was left out, excluded, or made to feel small. Left unresolved, that wound of being overlooked becomes a habit of talking about others in derisive ways to make the gossiper feel bigger, stronger, sovereign, and superior to others.

The problem of the heart is that God wants to heal the heart. He doesn’t just want to bandage it up so it stops sinning. He wants to be unified with it, he wants to be reconciled with it, he wants it to know it is loved and seen and cherished and desired.

Seeing this has changed everything for me again. I mean, there is literally no place in my life, politics, church involvement, Bible reading, writing, marriage, friendships, etc., where this realization has not affected it (I’ll be writing about how over on my Substack). If I see people not primarily as sinners who need to get their junk together, but humans made in the image of God desperately trying to do their best living in a broken world with broken hearts, it changes everything.

I’m going to be a more tender listener, a more gracious voter, a more grounded Christian, a more circumspect thinker, a more discerning writer, and on and on it goes. But more than all of that, I’m going to be able to look at my own sin and say, “What is this broken behavior I’m exhibiting trying to show me about what God wants to heal in me?” When I snap at my husband or resent a friend or am lazy with chores or feel angry about the government or any other sideways thought or action I have, there is something God wants to call attention to in my heart that needs his love, grace, forgiveness, purpose, gentleness, kindness, and healing attention.

This is why I talk about sin in terms of unhealed or unresolved brokenness. Not because I don’t take sin seriously, but because I take it so seriously I don’t think a changed behavior is enough. It’s just not enough. I promise you, it’s not. Whatever regular whitewashing you’re doing to a tomb, it’s not going to change the stinking, rotting corpse inside. Only God can do that. And God wants to do it. He wants to do it now.

Okay, but how?

I don’t know how he’ll do it for you. For me it was a combination of taking a specific inventory of spaces where I had guilt, shame, anger, abuse, and passivity. Each of those spaces pointed directly to something God wanted to heal in me. And in none of those spaces did the guilt, shame, anger, abuse, or passivity disappear until I did the work.

I’m still doing the work. Therapy helps me. Regular confession helps me. Letting people ask probing questions helps me. Answering them honestly helps me. The bread and wine helps me. God isn’t wasting anything in my work to give him my whole heart to heal and love.

And he wants to do that for all of us, starting in our very own heart.