Caring Well Training Part 1: The heart is the target ~building relationships by seeking to understand

I am producing a curriculum for leaders in my church on how to care for people well and will be sharing the monthly content here since it is relevant to anyone seeking wisdom and skill related to this topic.

When caring for and leading people spiritually, it’s important to think about our overall goal in influencing those that God allows us to encounter. We are never after simply creating behavior change or attempting to control other people’s actions, but instead, we want to access and help reveal the heart of the people we care for so that we can embody Christ to them and meet them where they are, inspiring and encouraging them to grow. This is, of course, a process. This process begins when we seek to understand who they are and what they are navigating, so that we are addressing not surface issues and symptoms but core issues and causes.

When we say we are accessing hearts or the “heart is the target”, it’s important to remember that one thing that is true of every human heart we encounter is that we all experience life as both a sinner and a sufferer. As believers, we are also saints but we know that in church ministry we will encounter people at all stages of their faith journey— saved and unsaved— and we won’t always know for sure where people stand as we begin to care for them.

This understanding is a crucial starting point for us so that we don’t simply assume that people are either victims or the sole cause of their troubles but instead we hold both of those realities (sinners and sufferers) as we seek to understand who this person is that God allowed to cross our path.

One of my favorite analogies for the heart that Jesus used is soil. And when we say the word heart, I want you to think of the inner person—the spirit, soul, mind, emotions. It’s the real us.

When we think about the goal of discipleship being to people women to read, study, know and apply the word of God to their hearts and lives, we are saying that we want the SEED of the word of God to have the chance to take root in the soft soil of our hearts and produce beautiful fruit in their lives.

But the reality is that the soil of our hearts is not always soft. 

Many things in life lead to hardness of our soil and can fall in the category of our own sin or the sins of others or the pain of living in a broken, fallen world.

So, one way to think about our role in the lives of the people we encounter is lives as “tillers of the soil” — brothers and sisters who come along to help soften the soil of others so that the Word can take root. 

How do we do that? First, as we have said, we seek to understand. This is as simple as it sounds and more significant than we realize. When someone takes the step, even a baby step, to briefly share or acknowledge a struggle in their lives, our first role is to simply move towards them with the desire to hear them and understand.

This is done through good question asking and good listening, which we will dive into further in future months. But for this month we are just looking at the big picture that our job is not to solve the problem or jump to a conclusion but instead to slow down and know that God is at work in this person’s pain or struggle.

We seek to understand with the knowledge that what someone shares with us or presents to us is rarely the whole story or the whole picture. Just as a tree has fruit on it (good or bad), the fruit is a result of what is happening in the roots of that person combined with the circumstances of life that have brought things to the surface.

So, for example, if someone is displaying the suffering of grief (maybe a lot of crying, hopelessness, sadness), before we start thinking through connecting that person to a grief support community we see that person in that moment as much more than their struggle and our willingness to connect with them and listen and seek to understand is a significant first taste of the care of God that is offered through His body, the church.

Another opportunity to seek to understand is when sin is brought to light.

When someone shares a sin that she is struggling with, we want to respond with the grace and truth that is offered to us in the gospel.

And we want to be careful to not simply address the behavior but to be available to hear what is ruling the heart of that person, leading her to try to find life apart from Christ.

For example, when I am harsh with my children, hearing that I need to talk more gently to them because Christ has been gentle with me can be helpful. But if I can go a step further and see that my desire for comfort is ruling my heart rather than the Lordship of Christ (which of course is the sanctification process) I am able to pray about the root of that sin which may be leaking out in other areas of my life as well.

Another way to say this is that our heart has treasures that can turn to idols when we want what we treasure more than we want God or more than we trust God to give us what we need. So, the answer becomes learning to treasure God more so that He can rightly order our desires which will then produce the fruit in our lives that we so deeply desire— the fruit of the Spirit.

We are all in need of change as we help others in need of change. 

May the WORD of the God and the person of Christ has his way in all of us.

Isaiah 55:10-13

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eaters shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” 

To hear more in podcast form, send me a message and I'll send it to you!