When I speak or teach, God has taught me the material before I stand before a crowd. Confessing my weakness and teaching women what I’ve learned is rewarding. Writing the blog for Girlfriend Ministry is a blessing and an honor, but it can also be quite scary because I reveal my weaknesses, my shortcomings and whatever God is using in my life to draw me closer to Him. I do so in the hopes that someone else out there can relate, can learn, and will know you aren’t alone. So here’s my confession.
Too many times as a Christian I’ve become blasé about the Word of God. I’ve heard the same verse so many times. I’ve read the same verse too many times to count that I don’t bear the weight of the words I read. I don’t know the depth of its meaning because I’ve become numb to the words.
God recently convicted me by waking me up early one morning with these phrases on my mind:
With all your heart
With all your mind
With all your strength
With all your soul.
Have you heard those words before? Have you read them before? Have you ever felt the weight of those words or know the depth of them?
Let’s look at heart. In Hebrew in the Old Testament, the word heart is lebab. It means inner man, will, most interior organ, central point for blood, and the seat of life. In the New Testament the Greek translation for heart is kardia, which is the root of cardiology. It is the seat of physical life.
The heart starts beating around the 16th day after conception, and it continues until the day you die beating around 100,000 times a day. You don’t have to tell it to beat. It just does. It’s autonomous. The Bible tells us we are to love the Lord our God with ALL our heart. Our love for God should be autonomous, should be the most natural thing. We are created to love God but because of sin we choose to rebel.
In Deuteronomy 4:29, 6:5, 10:12, 11:13, 30:6 and Proverb 3:5, Jeremiah 29:13, Zephaniah 3:14, Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:30, Luke 10:27, Acts 8:37, Psalm 9:1, and Psalm 138:1, Scripture tells us we are to seek with ALL our heart, love, serve, return, obey, and trust God with all our heart. We are to believe, be glad and rejoice and praise God with ALL our heart. But how many of us do all those things with all of our hearts?
When the whole heart fails to work, there is arrhythmia, heart failure which can lead to death. When one or more chambers fail to pump, there’s weakness, blood pressure issues, fainting, dizziness, tightness in the chest and difficulty breathing. When the heart doesn’t work completely, the whole body is affected. When you withhold part of our heart from loving, serving, obeying, trusting, believing and praising God, how does that affect the body of Christ? How does it affect your relationship with God?
If the heart is the seat of life by circulating the blood, what kind of relationship do you have with your Savior who spilled His life-giving blood for you to give you eternal life when you are only willing to love Him with part of your heart?
Do you see what I mean? These words have great weight and depth, and they’ve become so common I failed to treasure them in my heart.
Abba Father,
Thank you for your beautiful love letter to us. Your Scripture is so full and rich, and thank you for wanting to cultivate that kind of relationship with those who believe and confess you as Lord. Father, I thank you for loving us first (1 John 4:19). Thank you for loving us and thinking we were worth dying for in order to have a relationship with us. Please forgive me for failing to love you with ALL my heart. Please forgive me for failing to serve, return, obey, trust, praise and believe with all my heart. I’m so thankful that when we seek you with ALL our heart, we can find you.
Amen