Standards—we all have a set of standards by which we live. Your heart is where you formed your standards for how to live right, whether you intentionally formed them or had no say in the matter. Your standards may include ideas about parental authority, gender roles in marriage, obedience and discipline of children, a focus on headship and submission, Bible knowledge, and formal church attendance. Or it may include a mix of other ideas for how to live for Christ that you picked up along the way of life. And you might even think you follow your ideas out of love, but still sadly fall short of the fruit of what loving family relationships look like.
You’ve been learning from my previous post that living out of your head in this way cuts you off from the workings of your conscience where the Holy Spirit wants to influence you about your standards for righteousness. He wants to show you the poor judgment you’ve had about your standards.
The Great Disconnect
Your set of standards is where you will experience a major breakdown—the great disconnect of all disconnects in your relationship with God. Standards make you conscious of doing things right or wrong. When substitute ideas are raised then your conscience is set to respond to those standards, and you think you are doing things right.
This is where you can really get into trouble. If you’re following false standards, things won’t turn out the way you had hoped, and confusion can result, not to mention a whole host of other negative actions and responses toward God and others.
False Standards Wreck Your Faith
Your false standards will make shipwreck of your faith, because they never need anything from your heart. They don’t require you to grow on the inside to know who you are in Christ, to come to trust His love for you, and to love Him in return instead of just living out a life of duty. Your true identity remains lost to you and insecurity drives you to continue looking for something to put on the outside of your life to make you feel like you are living for God.
In living on the outside, you are preventing yourself from hearing the Lord’s correction and instruction to your heart. You won’t experience the fruit and success you have hoped for if you don’t allow Him to educate your conscience to His standards for how to carry out relational exchanges, and how to apply truth to your life. He wants to show you that any kind of fear-induced system for right living will compromise your conscience and your children’s as well, leaving you completely ignorant of the inner workings of your hearts.
Do you know of selfish, unloving actions you are regularly taking against your family members? Do you know if you are disciplining your children out of fear, or out of anger?
When you choose to continue in your unloving ways, you are clinging to your ways and standards, thinking you have good enough judgment for what is right and wrong.
When you choose to stop your unloving behaviors and unloving inner responses, you are rejecting your fleshly ways and standards and presenting yourself to learn from God’s instruction to your conscience about His ways of love. His standards are always love-induced.
Are your children readily accepting your standards? When you tell them of what is unloving and wrong, do they readily accept your standard?
God wants to challenge your set of standards for living the Christian life. He wants to re-educate your conscience, so you can begin to serve His standard for righteousness—Love.
God’s Standard of Love
In Matthew 22:37-40 we see the Law of Love—God’s standard. It is a powerful tool to carry out two practical purposes in us—to know ourselves and to know Him.
“For [the real function of] the Law is to make men recognize and be conscious of sin [not mere perception, but an acquaintance with sin which works toward repentance, faith, and holy character].” ~ Romans 3:20 TAB
God wants you to become intimately familiar with keen insight about your particular ways of sinning so you can repent. He will continue to mercifully expose your self-centered ways by cutting away the heart of flesh to expose what is there.
The Bible calls this merciful act of grace, Circumcision. “…and [true] circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by [the fulfillment of] the letter [of the Law]. His praise is not from men, but from God.” ~ Romans 2:29 TAB
God is showing the self-made, self-centered ways that you developed to please yourself and other people so you will choose to reject sin (self-centeredness) and un-love from your life. He wants you to stop identifying with and following after your self-made substitutes of right living for Him, and identify with Him as His child and willingly learn His standard of un-self-centered love—how to love the people in your life.
Your Conscience Purified from Dead Works
The Scripture tells us that our conscience can be purified from dead works and lifeless observances to serve the [ever] living God (Hebrews 9:14), because Jesus shed His blood so we can be purified.
The “dead works” are all the false substitute standards erected in your mind for how to live the Christian life. You don’t have to create any artificial system for how to live your life for Him. What you need is to re-educate your conscience to a new standard, so your conscience is re-set to true north—LOVE—His real standard for righteousness.
Your Conscience Re-Set to God’s Standard
To re-set your conscience so it works for you again, and so you can cultivate hearing the Holy Spirit’s influence, God will show your heart His Law of Love — His ways of doing and being right, so you can see the contrast and come to know yourself better even as you are getting to know Him.
As you become familiar with God’s Law of Love by engaging in a process of repentance, you are responding to God’s standard and adopting it as the one you want to follow. Learning how to love much and well will form God’s holy character within you. You no longer wish to identify with your old ways of relating and self-made substitutes for righteousness. You reject unholy thoughts and habits from your life. Your conscience is being re-set to work for you instead of against you. Old ideas and ways begin to fall off of your soul, by the renewing of the spirit of your mind.
New Identity Formed As His Child
It’s amazing but new identity in Christ is formed within us, and we begin to experience increasingly more security as God’s own adopted child.
As time goes on, you hear His voice to you more and more clearly. He challenges the quality of your morality every single day. Coming up next week—”Moral Compass—the 4th Function of Your Relational Heartbeat”. God is at work to show you the quality of your morality where your moral compass is pointed, and He’s pointing you toward holiness—true north where He is.
Dear Hearts, what alternate activity have you engaged in to tell yourself you’re serving the Lord and that you’re righteous? What sorts of standards have you been following? Please let me know what you have been accustomed to doing, and what you’ve been doing about it in the comments below.
If you missed the introduction to this series of messages, you can find it here.
Download a sneak peek for the outline of topics to whet your appetite![Read Next: Moral Compass — 4th Function of Your Relational Heartbeat]
Oh my goodness…this article speaks straight to the heart of where I am right now. For all my Christian life I been living on the outside, trying to “clean things up” without letting anything touch my heart, and yet I have been desperate for something real. Even since first reading Marilyn’s messages about 18 months ago, I was still looking for a quick fix that would change my outside life, but was not yet willing to let God into my heart to begin work on the inside. But I am done running away from God! You asked what activities I to engage in to tell myself that I’m righteous. It’s not so much a standard as it is a twisted way of thinking I have used to avoid my conscience. I see that I engage in tearing others down in my mind so that I feel more righteous, despite the fact that my life and relationships are a mess. I am stopping that. I am finally starting to tell the truth about my own actions and the state of my relationships. I am running to the Lord in repentance when I realize what I am doing and what I have done that has been so terribly hurtful to those in my life. I am running to repent to those I have hurt. As I have started this process of telling the truth about myself, I have been shocked to see the depravity in my own heart and in my family…things I couldn’t see before when I was focused on thinking of the shortcomings of others. I choose to align my heart and my life with His Law of Love.
Thank you so much Annie for sharing from your heart. As hard as it is to come to realize such things, you’re in a really good place with the Lord and He will bring you through into fruitfulness! Love and hugs to you dear heart, Marilyn