(picture is of me after
work)
HOW’S YOUR HEART?
Most days when I come home
from work, I have paint on me, my hair is messed up and I’m generally not that
attractive. It only takes about 10 minutes into work and my appearance goes
downhill from there. The great thing is that the people around me don’t even
seem to care.
The Lord isn’t that
concerned about how we look either. First Samuel 16:7 says, “The Lord seeth [is
seeing] not as a man seeth [is seeing]; for man looketh [is looking] on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh [is looking] on the heart.”
But what condition is our
heart in? With all we look at in a day, our hearts may tend to get hard or we
may close them off sometimes, to protect ourselves. It gets easier and easier
to get hard-hearted toward others and toward God as well. The way to stay
tender-hearted and make sure the Lord is still seeing a good heart in us, is to
go to His Word consistently just to see how much He really does love us. Love
is the best heart healer and GOD IS LOVE (1 John 1:8).
Also we need to continue
to go to Him in prayer, talk to Him and ask Him to heal our hearts if we still
have pain, anger, jealousy, unforgiveness or other heart illnesses. Even if we
aren’t really feeling it, we can pray for it because it’s not God’s will for us
to have these things in our hearts. In fact, they are sins. If we pray for the
Lord to take away the sins from our hearts, He’ll do it.
I love what David says in
Psalm 51:10: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”
Psalm 4:4 tells us: “Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with
your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.”
This is telling us we need to respect God and quit sinning. I don’t believe we
are to be afraid of God, but I do think we need to have a healthy respect and
awe for Him and His commandments. If we don’t, there are going to be
consequences and not good ones.
The second part of that verse tells us something important too. We need
to commune with our own heart, find out where it’s really at and tell it to get
back to being tender and responsive to God and to the Lord Jesus.
We need to tell our hearts they’re going to be okay if we give them to
God and let Him put love and kindness and child-like sweetness back into them.
People tend to lose some of that over the course of rough times. We won’t get
hurt if we only trust Him and walk quietly and respectfully under His guidance.
The first part of 1 John 1:8 says, “He that loveth not knoweth not God.” If we’ve been loving people less
and being more offended and put off by others instead, and we expect to know
God, we need to change our ways.
We pray to God that our love life starts growing again, because we want
to know Him better. We read God’s Word and we pray for Him to make our hearts
pleasing to Him. We jump in as He guides us and only the Lord can make the risk
worthwhile.
I’ve always loved this verse, ever since I was a little girl: “Blessed
are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt.
5:8).
Pray with me this week for
the Lord to purify our hearts.
Love, Carolyn
You CAN . . . See + READ .
. . some CHAPTERS == IN my NEW book
* *** * WINGS: Journey with Jesus.
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