HEART ATTITUDES
Cultivating Life on the Inside
By Graham Beynon
IVP. 176 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 1 783 591 718
The test results are in, the news isn’t good, and the diagnosis from Dr Beynon is that it’s heart failure.
He proposes radical, painful, open-heart gospel surgery. All too often our Christian lives consist of mere outward conformity and dry duty with little or no inner vitality. Mark 7.6 comes to mind: ‘these people honour me with their lips but their hearts are far from me’ – sadly we also can be guilty of hypocrisy. Graham Beynon shows us how to create, sustain and nurture the right ‘heart attitudes’ towards God so that we might live authentic Christian lives, make real spiritual progress and find fulfilment in our walk with God.
Centre of personality
We tend to use the word ‘heart’ to refer to our feelings, so we speak of ‘heartthrobs’ and 'broken hearts'. In a helpful introduction Beynon shows us that in the Bible the term ‘heart’ refers to the centre of the personality; the totality of the inner person. As such, the heart is to be seen as the origin of perceptions, thoughts, reasoning, imagination, desires, affections, will and belief.
In nine short easy-to-read chapters Beynon then looks at key heart attitudes (Love, Fear, Joy, Peace, Humility, Confidence, Thankfulness, Contentment and Hope). He carefully considers what the Bible means by each one of these attitudes and how the good news of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, ascension and glorious return should produce each one in us. Particular highlights for me were the chapters on ‘Fear’ and ‘Thankfulness’, where I found myself thinking ‘why hadn’t I seen that as clearly before?’. Each chapter is solidly rooted in Scripture, realistic about life in a broken world and includes helpful illustrations of how each attitude might be nurtured in practice.
I was a little disappointed that the author didn’t include some personal reflection questions, or group discussion questions to help the reader(s) diagnose their own sinful attitudes and fully engage with the challenging content. This very minor quibble aside, Beynon does an excellent job in showing us that it’s not enough to do the right things, or even believe the right things, but we must also cultivate the right affections and desires to match them. This book will both inform your mind and stir up your affections towards our glorious and gracious God – I wholeheartedly recommend it.
