Of Heroes

If you’ve ever been to somebody’s MySpace profile, you may have noticed a series of boxes down the left side of the screen. The supposed idea behind said boxes is that you can get to know a person to some degree without ever speaking a word to them. Essentially, these boxes, under the header of “Interests,” eliminate a fair amount of conversational small talk that might take place if you were ever to have, dare I say it, a real conversation with this person. If you haven’t been to a MySpace profile, you’re a rare breed but I’ll help you out here. There are six sections to “Interests:” General, Music, Movies, Television, Books… and Heroes. (Side note: I haven’t yet figured out why “Heroes” are actually an interest, but that’s not the point.) I find it most interesting that Tom (Tom is the creator of MySpace, if you’re still not quite on board here) has elected to place this section of “Heroes” right alongside these other Interests. There’s only so much you can really learn about a person by the music they listen to or the books they read, but knowing somebody’s heroes… that is telling indeed.

And so, being the MySpace addict that I am, one of the first things I look at when I arrive at somebody’s MySpace profile is their list of heroes. I do not do this because I wish to form a hasty judgment of a person, but because in comparison with the rest of MySpace, that’s really the only worthwhile information to be found on most profiles. It was with great interest, therefore, that I read on someone’s profile last week: “I don’t have any ‘heroes’ because I haven’t met someone that I want to be like. I mean, there are people who I respect and admire, but I am my own person and I don’t want to be like anyone else, because one way or another we all have flaws and bad qualities.”

And so I began to think. The unwritten question posed by this person’s response is one we must ask and answer before we can move on: What exactly is a hero? Is it someone that we want to be like? Or is a hero simply someone who we respect and admire? Certainly we can all identify to some degree with the statement of “I don’t want to be like anyone else.” The desire for individuality and uniqueness is universal, though certainly with various degrees of prominence in different people’s lives. And truly, every human does have their own shortcomings, and so apart from Jesus Christ, there will never be someone whom we should want to be like in every respect. Perhaps then, a partial definition of a hero is someone with certain qualities we would like to imitate in our own lives.

I think there’s more to that definition, though. What if we were to add in respect and admiration? Is a hero someone whom we respect and admire, with certain qualities or characteristics that we seek to imitate? Surely respect is an important part of this definition; it is unthinkable for someone to be my hero if I have not a great amount of respect for him or her. And so I continued to think about this person’s response, and what it meant for someone to be someone else’s hero. I considered my own list of heroes: What made them so heroic to me? Yes, they fit the above definition, but so did many others whom I did not necessarily consider personal heroes. What made these people different to me?

I began to dialogue with this person. Indirectly answering this question, he said to me: “When I think of the word ‘hero,’ I think of someone who has such an impact on someone’s life that they are forever changed.” And there it was, the word for which I had been searching: impact. A hero must have impact. There are plenty of people whom I respect and admire and seek to imitate qualities of, but only a few of those people have had significant impact on my life. Regardless of whether our hero is someone we’ll likely never meet, or even somebody who is dead, or whether our hero is someone very close to us, a friend, family member, or pastor, the common factor behind every hero is that they have had an impact. Something they have done, or something they have said, or written, has somehow touched our lives in such a way that we change the way we think about something, or the way we behave, or even the way we feel.

Such people are blessings from God. He has placed them in our lives, whether distantly or intimately, to have such an impact on us that we are forever changed, to the glory of His name. He uses them to exhort us, to convict us, to encourage us, and to comfort us. Thank God for these people, and in turn thank them for their care and their example. And then consider to whom you might be a hero. Whose life are you in position to impact? Who around you is in need of someone who cares, someone who can show them what it looks like to live a life that glorifies God? As we said before, everyone has their flaws, their areas of struggle, but are you growing so that you can live as an example to others? Are you having an impact?

Soren's Song

Meet Soren. Soren believes in God, and Jesus Christ, and the cross which saved him from his sins. But Soren, like most Christians, lives on what some might call the spiritual roller coaster. For awhile, everything is great: he loves God with his whole heart and he continually strives to reflect that love with the actions of his life. He lives out each day with the goal of “walking by the Spirit” and therefore “not carrying out the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). At times though, Soren struggles. The weight of his sins begins to pile up, and he fails to lay them in turn at the foot of the cross, upon his Savior. He becomes discouraged with his failure, and his sin escalates until the point of desperation, at which he eventually turns back to the loving arms of the Father, repenting and placing his hope once again in Christ.

The pattern continues. From the spiritual high to the spiritual low… a seemingly unending cycle of “right-ness” with God. See, Soren is just an ordinary Christian. But he grew tired of the cycle, of the roller coaster. His emotions ran dry. Did his tears of repentance really hold meaning anymore? Could he experience true sorrow over his sins, knowing that he would come crashing back down sooner or later? He knew it wouldn’t be any different this time than it had been any time before, so why bother? Why subject himself to the pain of failure, and the disappointment in himself?

There’s something else you should know about Soren. Like most others, his emotions hold much influence over his entire being. Though his will and his mind may be focused on God, his emotions are indeed prone to wander and often tear down the strength of his will and mind.

So, as you can imagine, when his emotions ceased to care about sinning or not sinning, about loving God or hating God, the rest of Soren’s life began to fall apart. See, Soren reached the point where even sin no longer held the appeal that it once did, but neither did the life and hard work of sanctification and glorifying God. Nothing mattered, and nothing felt right or wrong. He just… existed.

But he didn’t want to give up. He had tried that before, and he knew the result would bring only further suffering. No, he knew that giving himself up to a life of sin was not the answer. But what, then? Could he make himself feel what he did not indeed feel? He wanted the desire to live for God, but there was only emptiness.

What Soren was experiencing was an internal battle within his own existence. He knew the truth: that to live his life for God would ultimately bring him lasting and fullest joy and bring God most glory. But he didn’t feel the truth. Quite simply, he did not care about joy or glorifying God. Under the sin-wrought control of his emotions, he didn’t care about anything.

Soren was confused, and hopeless. But Soren has a friend who cares about him very much: a friend who shared the following quote with him:

“What we cannot at once attain, it is well to desire. God judges us very much by the desire of our hearts. He who rides a lame horse is not blamed by his master for want of speed, if he makes all the haste he can, and would make more if he could; God takes the will for the deed with his children.”

The words of Mr. Charles Spurgeon resounded throughout Soren’s mind. There was truth in those words… there was hope… but there was also pain. There was pain in wanting desperately to feel that desire by which he was to be judged. He said as much. And so the friend replied, “There's not much difference between the want of that desire and the desire itself.”

Soren turned to his journal, and he wrote. He wrote to God: “All You ask is for me to try. You don’t ask for perfection. You got perfection at the cross. You ask only for ‘holy desires which lead to resolute action’ (Spurgeon).” As he wrote, and as he prayed, feeling began to return. Not feeling alone, but feeling accompanied by truth, by knowledge; emotion that flowed from truth, rather than overpowered truth. Soren began to fall in love with his Savior once again.

What great power lies in the emotions! The great Puritan writer John Owen writes of protecting our emotions from the influence of sin: “First, we guard our affections by mortifying our members. [In Col. 3:5] the apostle is saying, ‘you are to prevent the working and deceit of sin, which is in your members.’ He also says, ‘set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.’ Fixing and filling your affections with heavenly things will mortify sin.” Owen continues, “Second, let us fix our affections on the cross of Christ… When someone sets his affections upon the cross and the love of Christ, he crucifies the world as a dead and undesirable thing. The baits of sin lose their attraction and disappear. Fill your affections with the cross of Christ, and you will find no room for sin… Remember also that the vigor of our affections toward heavenly things is apt to decline unless it is constantly looked after, exercised, directed, and warned… Let us be jealous over our hearts to prevent such backsliding.”

Indeed, let us direct our emotions toward the Savior who loved us first. And let those emotions, governed by the mind and the will, cultivate a holy desire for a life that glorifies God. And as Spurgeon exhorts, such ‘holy desires must lead to resolute action.’ God is asking us only to try as hard as we may with what we have been given. So let us try.