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"Above all else, guard your heart, for it is
the wellspring of life." (Proverbs 4:23-NIV)
It's no wonder Proverbs makes this kind of statement about
the the heart. According to the Scriptures, the heart can be a
whole lot of things; troubled, wounded, grieved, broken, glad, merry, joyful, rejoicing.
It can also be whole or divided, foolish, steadfast, true, upright,
stout, valiant. The heart can be frightened, faint, cowardly,
wandering, forgetful, dull, stubborn, proud, hardened, wicked and
perverse. According to Jesus a heart can also be pure and even
noble (Matt. 5:8; Luke 8:15). The Bible sees the heart as the source of
all creativity, courage, and conviction. It is the source of our
faith, our hope, and of course, our love.
A surprise to many, the heart is also the abode of our
motives, as when our Lord will "expose the motives of men's
hearts" (1 Cor. 4:5). A person's character is determined by
his motives, and we see here that motive is always a matter of the heart.
Also, the heart is where we do our deepest thinking. "Jesus,
knowing what they were thinking in their hearts", is a common
phrase in the Gospels. Solomon asked for a wise and discerning
heart. Yes, as author John Eldredge says in his book, Waking the
Dead, "the mind is a faculty and a magnificent one at that.
But the heart is the dwelling place of our true beliefs."
When John speaks of the mind here, he is talking strictly about the
information processing part of our brain. The heart is something
far more. The Bible takes a holistic look toward the heart as the
core of who and what we really are at any given moment.
Other scriptures point out that even such things as memory,
creativity, and courage come from the heart. The point is, you
cannot be the person God meant you to be, and you cannot live the life
he meant you to live, unless you live from the heart. And God
created your own unique heart.
Unfortunately all of us, to varying degrees, have allowed
others to do damage to our hearts as we were growing up, and have
continued to abuse them ourselves since then. Most of us have spent a
lifetime hiding the true heart God created in each of us, and developed
false selves in a futile effort to protect our hearts from past pain and
potential future abuse. If
we can't be loved and accepted as we are, well, we'll just hide behind a
person we create who we think will (apparently) be more acceptable.
But despite our best efforts, we soon become self-absorbed adult children trying to force
love from others that we can't even give to ourselves.
Our hearts become full of jealousy, envy, covetousness, adultery,
murder, addictions, and war! We
live so far from our true hearts. Ultimately, Satan and his demons are
behind all of it. In fact, the story of your life is the story of a
brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you can be, and
fears it. We must get our hearts back so we can truly connect with
our Creator who made them.
Jesus the Messiah came to heal and restore our hearts,
setting in motion a two-pronged approach to accomplish this.
First, at the very beginning of his ministry, he declared (by
quoting Isaiah 61:1-2) that he had come to heal the broken hearted and
set the captives free. Forgiving
our sins was only the first small step in this process and is not the
main message of his gospel. Beyond
forgiveness, this healing process involves walking intimately with God,
receiving his counsel, being restored by his power, and being equipped
to battle the real evil spiritual entities that have been warring
against us since the day we were born. Jesus came to literally
heal our hearts and set us free from the bondage of wounded hearts, so
that we can truly love God and our neighbor as we were created to do.
I have included a link at the top of this site to Ransomed Heart
Ministries, so that you can get the whole story through the
books they have to offer. The folks there are doing a profound
work of turning hearts of fathers to children, and children to fathers
as never before. It is about a work of deep repentance for each
and every one of us.
Second, Jesus the Messiah, who was declared to be the Son of
God by divine conception in his human mother (and not by a preexistent life, Luke 1:35),
proclaimed the future coming of the Kingdom of God to this earth.
This message was to be life-changing for all those who would hear
and believe in it, and believe in the one who delivered that message.
It was no watered down message about a vague future in some undefineable place in the sky, doing who knows what for all eternity.
It was a message about a very real life in God's future Kingdom
on earth. A life full of
love and accomplishment. The
Church of God (Abrahamic Faith), General Conference is still
faithfully proclaiming that same message in its New (not Old) Covenant
context.
For most of us life can be so debilitating.
We expect, hope, and desire for more from this current life than
what is really possible. The desire is not the problem.
The problem comes when we grasp for the fullness of our yearnings
by turning to the smaller stories we create for our lives, rather than
looking to that larger story where the Bridegroom is romancing his bride
(us) toward a marriage that will take place when he ushers in the Kingdom of
God. The truth is, in this
life what we have is really only a glimpse or taste of the joy that
we were meant to have. But we WILL have it!
Knowing this, can help us to wait patiently for it.
For God has placed in our hearts the desire for more--a life of
love and accomplishment beyond what we have realized in this life.
And both of these will be realized beyond our wildest dreams when
the Kingdom of God reveals the sons of God to all the created order.
After believing in his gospel of the kingdom as the seed of
our faith in him, Jesus can begin to heal us in our hearts (if we invite
him into those broken places with us) so that we are
better equipped to do those good works for which we were created.
Repentance becomes something we can really accomplish.
Further, the very message of the coming Kingdom of God
itself, gives us hope for those blessed things which we have not yet
been able to realize fully. When
Jesus ushers in that Kingdom at his second coming as King of kings, we
will participate in the love and work of God with the rest of his
children, forever.
However, the profoundly tragic reality is that the good news
Jesus brought has been supplanted by a false gospel--a watered down
version propagated at Satan's urging not long after the death of the
apostles. A gospel limited
to the forgiveness of sins and living a moral life so that our
(supposedly) immortal
souls can go to heaven and sing hymns for all eternity.
This is far from the powerful, life-changing gospel that Jesus
the Messiah brought in order to begin restoring hearts for his Kingdom.
Several beliefs from Greek philosophy were early introduced into the
simple gospel of the Messiah and his apostles. It started with the
unbiblical idea that man has an immortal soul, and that it is destined
to dwell in that ethereal heaven no one can describe, in a future even
less certain. Then things went from bad to worse when Jesus, the
prophesized human child declared to be the Son of God through a
supernatural conception within his mother, Mary; was transformed by those same
church fathers into a hard to explain "idea" of a second
person in a trinity of God persons. The very nature or definition
of who Jesus was changed, and thereby the distinctiveness of his message
was changed also.
Jesus came to proclaim the good news about the sure future
arrival of the kingdom of God to this earth, through him; and he
came to begin healing and restoring the hearts of broken people in
preparation for that kingdom. Your heart is truly the wellspring
of your life. Your true heart is the you who was meant to be if
life had gone the way it was meant to go. Beginning with the seed of
the kingdom message, Jesus works with you and in you to restore the
heart that has been damaged, broken, and held captive in a world where
the cycle of sin continues unabated. When he returns, your life
will never be the same again!
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