The Heart

 As promised, we shall begin to look at the heart, our human hearts. It is imperative that we do this, because we know that we are to worship God with all our heart. By faith, we really do believe that true and proper worship, is heart worship. This is our reasonable service, in view of our Lord’s generous mercies and grace to us.

The heart is the core, the centre of the matter. The heart is where it matters. However, the Bible has much to say about the heart of humans. There are some words that are encouraging and quickening and others which are most damning and we need to quickly seek help, if we are to always know true and proper worship.

Proverbs 4: 23, encourages us to be vigilant and ensure this about each heart. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. The issues of life are vast and varied and they come in all colours, wanted and unwanted; shapes, fit and unfit; sizes, befitting and unbefitting and produce, acceptable and unacceptable.

This is what Sovereign, Almighty, Creator God has told His prophet Jeremiah about our hearts. The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. Jeremiah 17: 9 -10. Who can gainsay God? When we hear what is spoken by God about our hearts, shouldn’t each one of us be seeking to have our hearts attended to by God? Surely, many of us, if not all of us, ought to be so convicted and bowed low that we lose all traces of pride, arrogance and self-piety and, like His servant David, have the heart that knows true worship with his Lord.

Indeed! We know that David knows this fact about the heart to be altogether true, for he prays to God to work on his heart. Create in me a clean heart O God, and renew a steadfast Spirit within me. Psalm 51: 10. Where are you? How is your heart? I am not ashamed to confess to our heavenly Father, that I desperately need Him to work on my heart and make me fit for worship and service to Him and others.

When Father, Sovereign God, spoke to His servant Ezekiel about His house, God’s house, the house of Israel, He said much that He would do to this wayward, idolatrous and adulterous house. Here is one thing God said, which pertains specifically to the heart. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36: 26.

Note carefully how God is speaking to the House of Israel. One nation is being spoken of as, one house. One house is being spoken of as one person. One person is being spoken of as one heart. One heart is being spoken of as stony, needing to be made flesh. Have you got the breakdown? Only God can speak, connect and act as He does. How does this reach and filter down to us, you and me, God’s Church? We know, in this era of time, we are God’s new and renewed Israel. So what is the present state and condition of your heart, my heart, the heart of the Church?

Remember, God calls one people, one house, and one house, one man, and one man, one heart. This is openly, plainly and undeniably witnessed in the early Church. This is what we read in Acts 4: 32a. Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul. It was the heart that knew Spirit and Truth worship; the heart that was pleasing unto God. It was the heart of the Church that knew a flesh heart. These converts to Christianity were filled with the Holy Spirit whom God had put within them. God had taken away the hard, stony heart out of their flesh and given them a new heart, a heart of flesh.

 This is absolutely true of the Church today and of you and me, but what have we done? How have we turned and returned to the ways of the world? Have we, like some people in that same early Church, refused the heart of flesh and sought good, the world’s good, by choosing to have a heart of stone, a hardened heart?  Is your heart a heart of flesh, or is it a hardened heart?

We delve more into the heart of stone, as we are brought to some realizations, about which we must never be ignorant. Whether we accept them or not, is not the issue. What is important and what really matters, is that we are being given truth and therefore we have no arguments or excuses for not knowing. Our single excuse will be one of preference or choice.

Holy Spirit, deal with our hearts, one by one and also as a whole body of believers, as only You can. Let not one of us remain in the ignorance of deceit, please. May we all be free from self-righteousness, self-piety and self-centeredness, that each may know the humility of truth, that bows only to You. Amen!