Monday, April 22, 2013

How is Your Heart?


A couple weeks ago at work I had a moment that I am not proud of by any means. I completely lost my cool and showed my coworkers a very rare side of me, not modeling Christ- to say the least. Although I went home and turned to God for forgiveness, the hurt and anger still weighed heavily on my heart. This all happened on a Friday and it carried over all day Saturday as well. However, it was all setting up perfectly for the encounter with God I would need that Sunday morning at church- one that would give me a new perspective on my walk and thrust me into my current mentality. I had never heard this song before, and as the man sang, the altars were opened for anyone who wanted to come forth to pray. All it took for me was the first few lines of the song and I was scooting out of my seat and heading straight down front.  Take a moment to listen to this and then come back to the rest of the blog:




Beginning the following Monday, I asked a good friend of mine to check in with me every day regularly and just text me little things like, “How’s your heart?” or, “Where is your heart at?” I am keeping this as a front-burner accountability point so that as the song says, the world sees that my heart looks like His heart. But it goes beyond that. I can put the Jesus front on for anyone- except for God. The bottom line is that if our hearts are not completely sold out to Him, then sooner or later our actions will follow. We cannot cheapen grace. So now I’ve made it my prayer every day to not only have the world see my heart looking like His, but for God to see the same in me. I owe everything I have to Him and He deserves my all (Matt 22:37).
I was talking with a friend of mine today and we were discussing the things that truly matter in life. She was just offered a very high level (and I’m sure high paying) position at her company- but she declined. She immediately recognized that it would end up taking away from her family time and time with her husband. Kudos to her! She went on to tell me that when she and her husband first got married they had so little, but were so happy. Simple nights just curling up together and watching a movie was all they needed. This got me thinking about how we can lose focus in our walks and ministry too. If David had never become anything more than a shepherd and the baby brother, he still would have kept singing and dancing his brains out before God- because that’s all he desired. Yes, his life took off on a crazy roller coaster of all sorts, but in the end- he came back and rested in God’s love. I wonder how many men and women who have “succeeded” in ministry too have fallen into this sort of trap? We may start out with such humble beginnings, but the danger lies in when we replace blessings with success. In other words, is it possible for someone to become so wrapped up in a thriving or even global ministry that they forget why they are doing what they are doing in the first place?

Make sure you do your own heart check this week. Is your heart lining up with the heart of Christ? How do you intend to keep it that way? Whatever it takes to keep you there- hold fast to that and show the world what it is so desperately in need of.


“That you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God” –Col 1:10 (NKJV)

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