God Wants My Heart

For many years I gave God some of me. He had some of my time, some of my thoughts, some of my money, some of my talents, but He never had the sum total of me;  I withheld my heart. I was afraid to give my heart because I was afraid of God. As it turned out my heart was what He required. 

Remember the rich young man in Luke 18 who came to Jesus? He said he’d followed all the rules since he was young. He considered this as making him worthy. Jesus never argued with him about that, he just told him what was required, “sell all you have”, and the rich young man went away sad. The thing required he could not let go of. For him that thing was his wealth and possessions. These things owned his heart. They were his treasure. For each of us God requires our heart.

Jesus will not be second place to anything else in our life. He wants to be our treasure; to be first. He wants to be manifested in our life by the Holy Spirit but we can thwart His work and presence. In fact when God is second place in our life the Holy Spirit is quenched or grieved and is unable to communicate with us until we get things right. (Isa. 59.2) God must turn away from our sin.

If God has my heart, if I am walking in His will, I will sense His presence. Look at Mark 16.20, it tells of the disciples of Jesus doing His will and the Lord “working” with them yet Jesus had gone. How could the Lord be working with them since He was gone? Because they were obedient they enjoyed  fellowship with the Lord through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. They sensed his presence and his working in them.

How do I know if Jesus has my heart or not? This can be tricky as our hearts are pretty adept at fooling us. (Jeremiah 17.9) We need to pray and ask God to reveal it to us. (Psalm 139.1) Another test is to ask yourself if you’re obeying God. Please don’t confuse this with church attendance, Bible study, singing in the choir or teaching a Bible class.  Satan won’t mind if you do all these things; he doesn’t mind that you know all about the Bible because he knows knowledge alone brings pride. (I Cor. 8.1) He hates it, though, when people repent and obey.

At a bakery where I worked the boss was leaving for vacation and he left instructions that, along with what needed to be done regularly, I was to make a batch of cherry pies.  So I made the pies. No big deal right? What if I had not done it? Most of us would never deliberately disobey our boss. My obedience to him in the matter of the pies became the measure of my obedience.

When Jesus left he gave some specific instructions that are as clear as my boss’s instructions were. He commanded us to preach the gospel.  So we need to ask ourselves: are we doing what he asked? When was the last time that I told someone about Jesus? This is a certain measure of my obedience to him. It is hard to side step this issue. 

Sure you’re in the choir, a hard worker at church but these are like the regular things I did at the bakery. The pies were the priority and measure of my true obedience to my boss. What if, when he returned and asked about the pies I told him I’d decided to make sugar cookies instead?  It is wrong to be involved in good things and neglect to do the best thing. Jesus told us to spread the gospel. How are we doing?

If God seems distant it might be because we are living our busy “christian” lives in disobedience to him. So what can we do? We need to move from being hearers of the word, to doers of the word. We need to repent. We need to change what we are doing and start doing what Jesus commanded us to do: preach the gospel. The gospel is the good news. It is  the Bible for sure but it is also your testimony. We do not have to be a preacher or theologian to share the gospel. Just tell the truth about what God the Father, His Son and the Holy Spirit have done and are doing in your life. And if nothing is happening then go to Him and ask Him to start a work in your life. 

God wanted my heart and once I’d given him than he was able to start a work in me. He made a new creation of me, now I need to continue to make myself available to him in order to grow and be more like Jesus. He is wanting to make me new each day. I need to listen and submit. When he has my heart I will desire to obey him, I will feel his presence and he will work in me just as he did in the lives of his disciples.