Language of believers

What is someone who asks Jesus to come into her heart saying? Here are things we need to bear in mind. The expression at least has this in its favour, that it is centred on Jesus. But according to the New Testament and the church’s confession of her faith, Jesus is not now in a position to come into anyone’s heart. Having suffered crucifixion, and enjoyed resurrection – how exhilarating that must have been! – he is now ascended to the Father, and though physically located at a place, the New Testament shows little or no interest in this bare fact, nor in the problems that it raises, but it stresses that he is now at his Father’s right hand, a place of exaltation and authority. So the language of taking Jesus into one’s heart invites Jesus to have a role which he is (literally) in no position to fulfil.

It is true that there is some language about Jesus in the New Testament that is related to talk of taking Jesus into one’s heart. We might point to Revelation 3.20, ‘If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. Jesus comes and enters into a person’s ‘door’. And there is John 14.20 ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’. But even here care is needed. The words from John’s gospel are concerned with the coming of the Spirit upon Christ’s departure. For the Father and the Son to take up their abode with the believer is to do this through the ministry of the Spirit. Christ Jesus will not abide with today’s believers literally, nor does the New Testament encourage its readers to think that he will, any more than Paul (for instance) is not in the least interested or concerned to show to his readers and hearers what is God’s will for their lives, or to offer advice about how they might discover what God’s will for them is.

Jesus-centric

But what is attractive about the language is that it is Jesus-centric. And bearing this in mind, one way to think of the use of such language is as an affirmation of the great fact of the believer’s union with Jesus. He is in Christ, witnessed to by the fact that Christ is in him by his Spirit. I suggest that this is one way of reading such informal expressions, as testifying to the believer’s willing union with Christ. But as well as keeping the emphasis on Christ’s Spirit as the indweller of God’s people, I reckon that such language ought to be tempered by the emphasis of Paul that Christ dwells in the hearts of his people by faith. (Ep. 3.17) The language of Christ coming into the heart is the language of union with Christ, and this (Paul tells us) is the language of believers.

read the whole article here by Paul Helm