Audio Transcript

Over the years, we have taken up a lot of questions from listeners who struggle with self-doubt — wondering if they are in fact an unbeliever; asking whether they have committed the unpardonable sin; asking whether they have or will fall away; asking whether they are one of the non-elect. There are a lot of sober, fearful, self-reflective questions like these that come up all the time in the emails we get. That’s true today in this question from Aaron.

“Hello, Pastor John! I’d like to first say that you have truly been a blessing to me. I thank God for you. I’ve recently started to pursue a better relationship with the Lord. I often come across this phrase, though, in the New Testament about the ‘hardened heart.’ My question is: How would I know if my heart was hardened against God? What does this mean? And how can I ensure that I don’t have a hardened heart toward God?”

Let’s start with the most general meaning of “hardness of heart” in the Bible, and then we can move to the specifically Christian meaning of “hardness of heart” in relation to God — and how to avoid it or how to get rid of it.

Unfeeling Heart

The most general meaning of the hard heart is a heart that lacks ordinary feelings of tenderness and compassion — for example, compassion for the poor. “If . . . one of your brothers should become poor . . . you shall not harden your heart . . . against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him” (Deuteronomy 15:7–8).

“We avoid getting a hard heart by being in a healthy community of believers who exhort us every day.”

Or not just compassion for the poor, but also compassion for the sick or the disabled. In Mark 3, Jesus sees a man with a withered hand in the synagogue, and he says to the people surrounding him, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” (Mark 3:4). “But they were silent.” Now, that was not a hard question to answer, right? Is it okay to save life or to kill? And they were silent. And it says Jesus “looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5).

So, the most common meaning for “hardness of heart” is a heart that cannot be touched and moved and made to feel tender emotions — empathy, sympathy — toward suffering. It’s like a stone; it can’t feel what it ought to feel. So, Jonathan Edwards, in his book Religious Affections — which I recommend very highly; it was powerful in my life at a certain point about fifty years ago — defines hardness of heart like this. After he surveys so many texts, he says, “Now, by a hard heart is plainly meant an unaffected heart, or a heart not easy to be moved with virtuous affections, like a stone, insensible, stupid, unmoved and hard to be impressed” (Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:117). That’s Edwards’s definition.

Unrepentant Heart

We can see that same reality as the Bible moves from the ordinary lack of feelings for the poor and the disabled to a lack of responsiveness to God. The hard heart refuses to hear God, refuses to turn to God in repentance. Zedekiah, it says, “stiffened his neck and hardened his heart against turning to the Lord” (2 Chronicles 36:13). In other words, he felt no compelling desire to repent and turn to the Lord. He was unfeeling, unresponsive, like a stone to all the efforts made by the prophets to speak truth into his life.

We see it even more generally in Romans 2:4–5: “Do you presume on the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath.” God’s kindness, God’s patience, God’s long-suffering, Paul says, ought to melt the heart with thankfulness and humility and repentance, and instead it meets with a heart of stone — unresponsive, unmoved, unthankful, proud, insolent. When the word of the Lord came to the people through Zechariah the prophet, it says, “They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear . . . the words [of] the Lord” (Zechariah 7:12).

So, hardness of heart in the Bible is a heart that is like stone in that it is unmoved, unfeeling, unresponsive — sometimes to human suffering, but, worst of all, unmoved, unresponsive, unfeeling toward God’s word and God’s mercies, God’s gospel offers. The warmth of God’s mercy shines on it, and it doesn’t melt. The reign of God’s grace pours out on it, and it doesn’t soften. Diamond-hard, it resists God.

Stone Made Flesh

So, we ask, how do we get rid of it, or how do we avoid getting it — a hard heart? Getting rid of a hard heart is decisively, the Bible says, a work of God — a miracle, a gift — and we should ask for it if we don’t have it.

Here’s Ezekiel 36:26–27 — this is a beautiful statement of the new covenant that Jesus fulfills when he sheds his blood for sinners:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh [that is, a tender heart that can feel, can be touched]. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

That’s the same, I think, as what we call being born again or being made alive or being called out of darkness into light. It’s a gift, it’s a miracle, it’s a work of God, and we should receive it as a gift.

Keeping a Tender Heart

Second, once we have been given a soft heart, we avoid getting a hard heart — reverting to hardness — by being in a healthy community of believers who exhort us every day, and help us recognize the deceptive nature of sin. Now, I say that because that’s exactly what Hebrews 3:13 tells me to tell you. It says, “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” That’s amazing. Get in a good community where you’ll be exhorted day by day with pointers to the deceitfulness of sin.

Sin is deceitful. It tells lies, and those lies harden the heart. If we don’t counter the lies of sin with the truth, our hearts are going to grow hard. And God has designed fellow Christians to remind us of this truth — the beauties, the preciousness, the worth, the satisfying nature of God and his ways, and the lies of sin. People need to speak that into our lives.

Sin tells us that God and his ways are not satisfying. That’s the main message of sin. Let me say it again: the main lie of sin is that God and his ways are not satisfying. And if we give place to those lies — we accept them; they start to grow in our heart — we become stones toward the all-satisfying God. Instead of God, sin becomes our satisfaction. We love sin. Sin has tricked us and made itself to look like what satisfies and made God look boring and unsatisfying. God begins to bore us, and if no one steps in and helps us feel the deceptive folly of sin, we’re going to wake up someday utterly like a stone, unable to enjoy God.

So, Hebrews 3:13 says, “Don’t let that happen.” Instead, confirm your calling, confirm your election. Show that you are a true Christian. How? By both exhorting and receiving exhortations every day “that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

How many close friends do you have in your life today? Take a minute and count them. Do you have more or less than you did ten years ago?

One recent study confirms what you might already suspect: many more of us have fewer good friends than we once did. In 1990, just 3% of respondents reported having no close friends. Thirty years later, that number has quadrupled to 12%. In 1990, one third said they had ten or more close friends. That number has now shrunk to just over ten percent. Nearly 90% cannot name a friend for each of their fingers. It’s not the only study to come to the same unsettling conclusion: Despite the tidal wave of new ways to connect and communicate with one another, we’re getting lonelier.

And that loneliness stifles human life. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!” (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10). If we try to live and work alone, we’ll stumble and fall alone. And when we fall alone, we won’t have the encouragement, correction, and support we need to get back up and press through our failures, sorrows, and trials.

No matter how many years it’s been, no matter how busy you feel, no matter how few your options are, no matter how much it costs you, you still need good friends — yes, even you.

So why do so many of us have so few of them?

Three Great Walls to Climb

It’s never been easier to make new friends and connect with old ones, so what’s hindering and disrupting these relationships? Drew Hunter, author of Made for Friendship, wisely puts his finger on three major obstacles we face today:

Three aspects of modern culture create unique barriers to deep relationships: busyness, technology, and mobility. . . . These unique barriers can weave together in a very isolating way for us. They encircle us like a rope barrier and keep true friendship out of reach. We may overpower one or two of these strands, but as the saying goes, a cord of three strands is not quickly broken. (30)

What keeps us from meaningful friendships? Busyness, because we fill our schedules so full that friendship feels like a luxury we just can’t afford. Technology, because while it allows for a lot more moments of “connection,” the crumbs it offers leads us to pretend we’re more meaningfully connected than we really are (and leave us starving for more). Mobility, because it’s harder to build real, lasting friendships in places where people are frequently moving away and moving on.

Those three emerging barriers to friendship certainly resonate with my experience over the last thirty years, and accurately explain some of the challenges we face in pursuing friendship in the twenty-first century. So how might followers of Christ overcome the hurdles and find some good friends?

1. Cadence: Live at the pace of friendship.

When did we become too busy for friends? At a cultural level, it’s difficult to trace the many factors (work from home, instant messaging and social media, on-demand delivery and entertainment, explosion of youth activities, and more). At a personal level, the disruption often happens somewhere between college graduation and our first child’s newborn diapers. The adult demands of work and family swiftly swell and crowd out the margin we used to have. The time with friends that used to cost us next to nothing now seems far too expensive.

Rather than assuming friendship is simply a casualty of higher callings, what if we assumed that friendship was still vital to those higher callings? Because it is. “Exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Of course, if you’re married, your spouse is one valuable voice, but he or she can’t be the only voice. Whether married or single, we need others from outside the home to sing (or shout) reality into our hearts and homes. In other words, we need friends.

“To experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human.”

And to experience friendship with fellow humans, we need to live at a pace that is human (which, ironically, may increasingly put us out of step with society). Instead of constantly scrolling by one another, what if we slowed down enough to see and hear and focus on the person in front of us? What if we practiced hospitality, not just with our kitchens and living rooms, but with our time and attention?

How different our lives might be if they were marked by something like the togetherness of the early church:

All who believed were together and had all things in common. . . . And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. (Acts 2:44–47)

Their lives were beautifully full, but not with the tasks, emails, and apps that dominate our days. No, their lives were full with people — with one another. Life was slower in many ways, and yet far more productive for being slow: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).

2. Presence: Find time and space to share.

Technology is not necessarily an enemy of friendship. It can be an unprecedented blessing when employed wisely. Imagine just how much previous generations would have given to be able to talk in real-time, even once, with a far-away loved one (much less actually see them on a screen). The problems emerge when we lean too much on technology — when it becomes a substitute for, rather than supplement to, physical presence. Every human needs food, water, shelter, and regular time with other humans.

The apostle Paul used the technology available in his day to communicate with his brothers and sisters in the faith, but he knew that writing was no replacement for eye contact: “I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you — that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11–12). He knew there were graces that ink and paper couldn’t carry. There was a whole class of encouragement reserved for living rooms and dining tables. He knew that something critical and intangible happens when two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus in the same space.

This doesn’t mean friends boycott technology. It does mean we acknowledge the weaknesses and limitations of technology (even the best technology), and love one another accordingly. A good place to start might be to quickly audit your current friendships and ask roughly what percentage of your interactions are physical or digital. The results will vary for people with different personalities in different circumstances and stages of life, but for every stage, circumstance, and temperament there should be some consistent, meaningful presence. It is worth fighting for more regular time to be face to face with at least a few good friends.

3. Permanence: Rediscover the value of staying.

Lastly, perhaps the largest hurdle of the three: mobility. It’s never been easier to pick up and move, which means it’s often much, much harder to find and keep long-term friendships. Just think for a minute about how many of your friendships in just the last two years have been disrupted by some major life change and the accompanying move. We’re the goodbye generation.

The depth of friendships our souls need won’t happen overnight. These gardens of trust require years, maybe decades, of patient attention and tending. So how do we make and keep friends in a day of so many goodbyes? The first thing to say may be hard for many of us to hear: rediscover the value of staying put.

How many people do you know in your circles who would forgo a better-paying, more-satisfying job in a more appealing city for the sake of Christian friendships and community? Building the kind of friendships that really matter and bear fruit requires the kind of sacrifices fewer today are willing to make. In the early church, and for most of history, this kind of permanence was simply a given. Picking up and moving was too costly. Today, permanence is becoming a discipline and a virtue. We might wonder, How many who are uprooting and leaving now will eventually come to realize what they lost and wish they had chosen church and friendships over convenience and job opportunities?

Some friendships, however, will survive moves and time zones, through some serious creativity and persistence, but very few will thrive. A few of my best friends today were once down-the-road friends (or even share-a-bathroom-and-a-kitchen friends), but are now several-states-over friends. We’re not as close as we once were, but we do what we can to stay in touch. The apostle Paul, for one, was a faithful long-distance friend, though it seems he was always planning a visit. He writes to those he knows well, loves more, and yet can’t walk over and see anymore:

“For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 1:8).
“[Timothy] has brought us the good news of your faith and love and reported that you always remember us kindly and long to see us, as we long to see you” (1 Thessalonians 3:6).
“As I remember your tears, I long to see you, that I may be filled with joy.” (2 Timothy 1:4).

“However faithful our faraway friends are, we all need down-the-road friends.”

Long-distance friendships are possible, and can be precious, but they are a little like walking uphill, requiring extra effort with every step (like writing twenty-eight chapters to the church in Corinth). They can’t be our only close friendships. However faithful our faraway friends are, we need down-the-road friends. And hopefully a few of them are down the road for the long haul.

4. Substance: Brave the depths of conversation.

Busyness, technology, mobility — those are three real and developing hurdles to friendship. We should all be aware of them and make some plan for clearing them. As I wrestled with each of them, though, I couldn’t help seeing a fourth major barrier, one that is by no means modern: triviality.

How many of our potential friendships — real, meaningful, durable friendships — have died on the rocks of sports, shows, or headline news? How many conversations began and ended on the paper thin surface of life? How often was God left out completely? The greatest challenge to friendship today may not be our schedules, phones, or moving trucks, but just how easy it is to peacefully float along above the rich depths of real friendship.

Social media can certainly aggravate the issue, but this temptation isn’t new. Satan has always been seducing us into the shallows of superficiality and distracting us from the depths of friendship. So how do we wade deeper? Through courageous, Christ-exalting intentionality: “Let us consider” — really consider — “how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:24–25).

If we commit to this kind of reflection, this kind of commitment, this kind of encouragement and correction, this kind of love, real friendship will emerge and endure. But we will need to be brave enough to go there, to spend more of our conversations in the deep end.

So, if you find yourself among the overwhelming majority of people without enough good friends, slow down enough to find some, make some regular time to be in the same room, fight harder to stick together longer, and then consistently press through the trivial to the more meaningful and spiritual. Pursue and keep the kinds of friends who stir your heart and life to better know and enjoy Jesus Christ.

Audio Transcript

Today’s question for episode 2001 is a book question from me, Pastor John. We like to talk books on this podcast, and in past episodes we’ve looked at seven ways books have changed your life. That testimonial was APJ 707. We’ve also talked about how 1 percent of book-insights make reading the other 99 percent worth it. That was APJ 1910. Classic point. More recently, we looked at ten of your favorite authors who write to edify the soul. That was APJ 1972.

Now, speaking of your library, I recently paged through your copy of Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book while working on my APJ book about this podcast, which comes out in February. More on that later, but as I was writing the introduction to my book, I found it instructive to see what sentences you underlined in Adler’s book, what sections you marked up, and how you jotted down notes in the front and back of the book. I noticed that you made something of your own index to your discoveries. Can you walk us through your book-marking strategy? When did you start the practice? Why do you do it? What types of marginalia are you adding to your books? And of course we all want to know: pencil or pen?

The answer is pencil, and there are reasons. I use a mechanical pencil so that it never goes dull, 0.5 millimeters. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is one of the very few books that I have read twice. Your mentioning it gives me a good opportunity to sound a warning to people who are going to ask me or others this question: the way a person underlined and wrote in a book — whether in the margins, indexes, or whatever — twenty or forty years ago may be very different from what he does today.

That certainly is the case with me. I am amazed when I look back on how many books I read, say, thirty or forty years ago that don’t have any of my own indexing in the front flaps, because today that is the dominant way for me to keep track of insights and enjoyments that I’m getting from the book.

Handmade Indexes

By “indexing” (that’s not a very accurate phrase, and I wish I had a better one), I mean simply jotting down, with a pencil in tiny handwriting, a very short three- to eight-word description or pointer in the front flap of the book. I write about what I have read in the book, along with the page number. Sometimes I have to weave it around what’s already there. In a short book, there may be anywhere from 30 of these up to, say, 150 or more of these little notes in the flap of the book at the front or, if I have to, in the back.

“I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people.”

I think the reason I didn’t do this in the early days — and my memory’s not good, so I may be wrong — might be that I wasn’t thinking primarily of reading for the sake of writing, or reading for the sake of preaching, or reading for the sake of systematic increase of understanding of particular truths, or reading for the sake of discovery and preservation of some striking and compelling way of saying something, all of which is what I’m so keyed into now.

So now, virtually every book I read — and I’m talking print books, not electronic (which I hardly ever do) or audio (which I do all the time). I’m talking about the books I’m going through all the time, the ones sitting on my chairs. I’m always reading something in print. That’s what I do. And all these books — I index them.

Even fiction. People say, “Oh, you’re kidding me. You read a novel with a pencil in your hand?” Yes, I do. I can’t read without a pencil in my hand. I’m not going to spend time reading, even fiction, if there is no life-giving insight or striking expression of reality worth preserving. Seriously, I don’t just read for pleasure. I read for a pleasure that spills over on other people, because that’s the biggest pleasure. “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

I read too slowly, and my life is too short, to read without the hope that what I’m reading will help me to think more clearly, to feel more fully, and to express more compellingly the glories of God in the word and in the world — and all of that is worth preserving in some way. It has been good to discover this about myself.

Reading Like a Teacher

I don’t presume, by the way, to suggest that everyone should be like this, but I realized along the way that my built-in, God-given impulse, my dominant impulse, is not to read, but to write and speak. To say it more generally, my bent is not to take in what others have created, but to be a creator. That’s just my bent. I want to make something new, usually with words, which means that all of my intake increasingly has become fuel for my own creation — for sermons, articles, books, poems, and devotions.

Now, I know this can be dangerous. There’s a big yellow flag here. I warned my students at Bethlehem College & Seminary, “Do not read the Bible in the morning just in order to produce a sermon on Sunday. Christ is glorious and precious and to be trusted in the very last hours of our lives when we can do nothing with his beauty but enjoy it on our way into heaven.” Yes and amen. So, don’t just be a user. Be an enjoyer of what you read. Savor it. Love it. Exult in it.

However, I believe that one of the evidences of the spiritual gift of teaching is that a person can scarcely prevent his mind from taking everything he reads and instinctively, without even trying, asking himself, “How would I say this? How would I say this in my own words? How would I explain this to other people? How would I illustrate it and live it? How does it fit into the framework of my own thought — or does it? Do I need to change my framework?”

This is why I not only index my books, but I keep a little field notebook (that I buy in packs of five from Amazon) beside my chair on my desk. This way, when I get a thought or an idea that stirs me up to think out my own train of thought, I have a place to put it. I have a place to write it down quickly.

There’s something about the mind of a teacher that can’t just hear things or read things and leave them. He’s got to do something with it. So, you can see what a huge impact that’s going to have on how I mark up my books.

Three Things to Index

Now, what goes into those indexes? Here are just a few thoughts.

One: fresh insights into my life or into life in general. My index for a biography of C.S. Lewis, for example, which I just took down from the shelf, has a notation at the front, from page xxiii, where he said, “Without self-forgetfulness, there can be no delight.” That got three asterisks in the margin. It got a notation in the front flap, and I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years. I mean, if that’s true, what an agenda for those of us who are pursuing delight in life. So, fresh insights — we mark them, we note them, we meditate on them, we try to grow into them.

Two: raw facts. If I’m reading a biography, and if I know I’ve got to give a talk about it, or if I want to use it in a devotion, I want to be able to spot birth, conversion, marriage, employment, controversies, death, and impact. That way, when I run my eyes down the front flap, I can get an outline of his life, and quick. I don’t have to go researching all over the place and say, “Now, when did he die? When was he born? When was he converted? When did he get married?”

“Pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again.”

Three: great illustrations, ones that might be useful to giving a striking impression of a viewpoint, even a viewpoint we disagree with. For example, I’m reading a book right now called Biblical Critical Theory. I’m about two hundred pages into it, and on page 196, I wrote a little index in the front about Jean-Paul Sartre on atheism. He said, “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or without outside himself.” That’s a quote.

Now, I thought, that’s a serious confession from an atheist. It’s out of his mouth, it’s footnoted, and it’s tragic. It’s just tragic, and it will probably make its way into some sermon, article, or book someday. (Though I don’t mean to give the impression, with this idea of indexing, that that’s all I do. I do underline, and I still make comments in the margin, ones like “great” or “baloney.”)

Why Annotate

And yes, I use a pencil, not a pen. Here’s what happened. About thirty years ago, I took a box of used books to Loome Bookstore in Stillwater, Minnesota, to sell them. They would not even look at the books that had marginalia in ink. It was a principle. It was a law. I don’t know all the reasons for it, but that’s one reason.

My main reason is that I am fallible. I make mistakes. I want to go back and erase the word “baloney” because two pages later he explains himself, and I was wrong. It’s not baloney. I don’t want to memorialize my mistake with a pen.

One of the main functions of underlining and marking in the margins is simply to help me pay attention. That’s the big reason for underlining, for me anyway, and for putting notes in the margin: pay attention, be engaged, be an active reader — even if you will never look at these pages again (which is true for most of the pages that I read).

So, I think the main takeaway from this episode, Tony, is this: Know why you read. Know what you are reading right now. Then adapt your markings to fit your purpose.