The Heart

This was my morning. I can't explain how God blessed my time this morning. It was a moment where everything I was hearing and reading in His Word hit me right where I needed it. I opened iTunes and looked through the recently added podcasts. I subscribe to many so there are always new ones coming up and no way I can see them all. I was looking through some new ones from Mars Hill and saw one titled the heart. I started listening and it felt like God was sitting across the table from me.

Before I get into why I chose that one, let me give you some insight to my life lately. I have many desires and things I am passionate about. A lot of things I desire are good and I believe that God gives us His desires for us. But then there are some desires that are completely sinful and conflicting with the desires of God. I've had a very hard time lately fighting against the ones that are not of God and choosing the lesser, the sinful desires rather than the desires of God within me that I am more passionate about.

When I saw the sermon titled The Heart, I didn't immediately think it was something I needed to hear. I was just moved to listen. Maybe that was God, maybe not, but either way I needed to hear it.

Mark Driscoll began to talk about the book of Proverbs and how the matter of the heart is very important to God. Jesus commands that "we love the Lord, our God, with all our heart" and that "those who are pure in heart are blessed for they shall see the Lord." He brought up two questions that opened my eyes to the topic of the heart. First, why do we sin? Romans 5:12-21 states we sin because of Adam and Eve, inheriting sin's nature and implications. Second, where is sin rooted? Sin is rooted in our heart. The heart is our center, and the essence of who we are. Proverbs 4:23 says, "keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life." Our heart is as a spring where life flows from. He continued to use the illustration of a spring flowing and began to talk about how we deal with the problem of sin coming from and being rooted in our heart.

All too often we try to fix the problem of sin or desiring sin with behavior modification. We try to change the problem and not change our heart; where the problem or the sin is rooted. It's like when someone realizes they eat too much. They see the problem, the sin, and instead of going to their heart to see why they do that, they go on a diet and stop eating too much. It seems like a fix, but what they've really done is exchange gluttony for pride. Modifying the behavior ultimately isn't the answer. We must go to the heart in order to change it.

Listening to this helped me to see that even though I am having these sinful desires that are my nature, I can change them by going to the source of it in my heart and seeing why and how to change it. It also gave me some insight into the heart that God gave me when I began following Him. The heart I have has a Lord, power, purpose, community and desires that all are from God. A heart that is in Christ is faithful, desires obedience, corrective, teachable, content, desires wisdom, cheerful, helpful, discerning, persuasive, humble, intelligent, beautiful and repents.

We all have deep desires and when God resides in our heart, we have desires. All too often we are told that desires are bad, but that's what religion says. Christ says that He will give you a new heart and new desires. Not only that, but He will also give us a passion to fulfill those desires. He also says we will have conflicting desires, but where we need to be different is seeing whether it's a desire of God for us. We need to begin to see where our sin is rooted and change our heart, not just revert the problem into another sin. Once we do that, we can see the desires that are from God and are deeper than the sinful ones and give them attention. Through that, our sinful nature desires are diminished. We've just got to get to the root. Get to the heart and work from there, for it's where life flows.

It's not that our passions are too strong,

 they are too weak 
and we are too easily pleased with lesser sinful desires

 rather than pursuing, with great passion, 

our greatest desires. 

-C.S. Lewis