Lips and Hearts (2 of 2)

The root cause is the displacement of the Father as the primary audience.

Part Four’s definition of eternal life as knowing is the diagnosis and the prescription simultaneously. The person who is genuinely in the knowing relationship of John 17:3 does not primarily perform for the crowd because the Father is the primary relationship. The audience has not been removed by moral effort. It has been replaced by Someone more real. When the Father is genuinely present — when the knowing is alive and growing — the crowd becomes irrelevant as an audience not because the disciple has disciplined himself to ignore the crowd but because he is attending to Someone more worth attending to.

This is why the order of Volume II matters. Part One gave the disciple the King’s sealed authority. Part Two put him in the upper room with the King the night before the cross. Part Three gave him the King’s constitutional declaration of Kingdom life. Part Four gave him the King’s own definition of eternal life as present-tense knowing. Part Five — this Part — comes here, after all of that, for a reason. The Woes cannot be addressed by people who have not yet received what precedes them. The distance between lips and heart is closed by the knowing, not by the effort. And the knowing is what the first four Parts of this volume exist to produce.

The distance between lips and heart is not closed by trying harder to mean what you say. It is closed by knowing the One to whom you are saying it well enough that the saying and the meaning become the same thing.

The Lament and the Invitation

Matthew 23 does not end with the Woes. It ends with a lament.

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it! Look, your house is left to you desolate! For I tell you, you will not see me from now until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’”

— Matthew 23:37–39 (NET)

The chapter that contains the most severe warnings in the Gospels ends not with condemnation but with longing. “How often I have longed to gather your children together.” The King wanted them. He wanted the Pharisees. He was not detached and clinical in His warnings. He wept over the city whose religious leaders were about to hand Him to Rome.

The hen image is the image of a mother who runs toward the fire to cover her chicks with her own body, dying so that they can live under her wings. Jesus did exactly that. Within hours of speaking these words, He went to the cross and became the covering. The lament of Matthew 23:37 is the announcement of Matthew 27. He longed to gather them. He gathered them in the only way available to Him: by going to the cross and making it possible for even Pharisees to come under His wings.

The Woes are followed by the lament. The lament is followed by the cross. The cross is the answer to every Woe. The person who has been diagnosed by the Woes does not move from diagnosis to despair. He moves from diagnosis to the cross. From seeing the distance between lips and heart to the One who covered that distance in His own body on a Roman instrument of execution.

This is the gospel that Part Five assumes and does not explain at length, because Volume I Part One already explained it and everything since has built on it. The Woes are real. The failures they name are real. The cross is more real than any of them. Receive the diagnostic. Bring it to the cross. Come under His wings. Let the gathering happen.

From the Woes Back to the Knowing

Part Five ends where Part Four ended: with the knowing of John 17:3 as the only sustainable alternative to the Pharisaic failure.

The Pharisee is the person who has religion without the knowing. The disciple of John 17:3 is the person who has the knowing and whose religion is the expression of it. The difference between them is not primarily moral effort. It is not primarily theological precision. It is not primarily the quality of the discipleship program they attended. It is the presence or absence of the present-tense, growing, obedience-deepened, suffering-tested, never-completed knowing of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent.

The Woes describe what religion produces without that knowing. The Beatitudes describe what the Spirit produces when the knowing is present. The Sermon on the Mount describes the life that flows from it. The Upper Room Discourse describes the relationship that sustains it. And John 17:3 names what all of it is for.

Know Him. Let the knowing close the distance. Let the Father become so real as an audience that the crowd becomes irrelevant. Let the lips and the heart speak with one voice. Not because you have achieved religious consistency. Because you have found the One worth being consistent for.