Now that we have completed our redo for godliness, we need to make sure we get it to the heart level. This daily devotional introduces the theme for 2022 by looking at various aspects of the heart.
Nuggets
- Obeying God’s laws and commandments in our hearts expands it.
- God and His laws and commandments live in our hearts.
- Only God can transform our hearts.
- As we were made in God’s image, God’s laws and commandments, though shattered, are still written on our hearts.
- Only God can purify our hearts.
To read devotions in the At the Heart Level series, click the button below.
Devotions in the Where Are You At with the Requirements? series
Each year since I’ve started putting devotions out on the web, I’ve picked a word to help focus on what I wanted to discuss.
2019 was intentional
2020 was self-discipline
2021 was godliness
This year’s word is heart. Well, think about it.
We have to intentionally choose — daily, almost minute by minute sometimes — to follow God. That takes self-discipline, because Satan is going to do everything in his power to knock us off the Sanctification Road.
Our goal is to become godly. We do that by getting it to the heart level.
I have known this was going to be the topic since March. (Last year, God gave me the topic in August.)
The verses I’ve picked for the year is I John 3: 19-24.
“By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us” ( I Jn. 3: 19-24 ESV)
We’re going to go through that verse by verse later. Right now, I want to look at some of the one-liners that I have been collecting. These show us various aspects of the heart.
Those are going to make up the headings. (So, the words aren’t my words. I’ll tell you who wrote them as I give them to you.)
“The heart must be enlarged if we would run in the way of His commandments; and don’t narrow it and impede your progress by permitted sin.”
Resource
Obeying God’s laws and commandments in our hearts expands it.
We have said, all the way since our self-discipline days, that we can’t discipline ourselves. We can’t make ourselves godly.
Whatever we are trying to do has to be God doing it to us. He will be reconciling us to Himself. “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5: 18 ESV).
God will pardon us when we ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness is, when we ask, the act of God pardoning us because we have shown repentance for breaking His laws and commandments, which allows us to become holy as He is.
Glossary
But look what Pope said. Our hearts need to be enlarged. They can’t stay the size that they were.
How are they enlarged? By following God’s laws and commandments.
What narrows our hearts? They are narrowed when we keep sin within them. Maybe we don’t want to give up our pet sin. Maybe we think something should be a sin.
Sins are actions by humans that disobey God and break one of His reasonable, holy, and righteous laws and commandments, goes against a purpose He has for us, or follows Satan’s promptings.
- Holy means to be set apart — because of our devotion to God — to become perfect, and morally pure while possessing all virtues.
- Perfection means we reach a state of maturity because the combination of the spiritual graces form, when all are present, spiritual wholeness or completeness — holy, sanctified, and righteous.
- Spiritual graces are worldly morals that have been submitted to God to further His kingdom instead of enhancing this world.
- Sanctified means to be set free from sin.
- Pure means not being sinful or having the stain of sin.
- Perfection means we reach a state of maturity because the combination of the spiritual graces form, when all are present, spiritual wholeness or completeness — holy, sanctified, and righteous.
- Righteous means we are free from sin because we are following God’s moral laws.
Glossary
No, our condoning someone else’s sin does not enlarge our hearts. It narrows it.
Our heart is only enlarged when we are in a genuine relationship with our Creator and following His laws and commandments.
“What is in the head may soon be lost, but what is in the heart abides.”
Resource
God and His laws and commandments live in our hearts.
We have long said that we have to have heart knowledge, not head knowledge. But Greenhill took a little different slant on this.
What goes into the heart must clean house. Greenhill said that we must “… put out of their hearts filthiness, malice, wrath, whatever had possession of the heart, and kept out the Word, and open their hearts to entertain the Word.”
In other words, we have to move out whatever kept us from loving God and let Him into our hearts. It is there that He can grow us to be more like Him.
“While religion regulates and transforms all the powers of the mind, its first and immediate effect is not on the understanding to make it more enlightened; or on the judgment to make it more correct; or on the imagination to make it more discursive and brilliant; or on the memory to make it stronger and more retentive; but on the heart, to purify it from all moral defilement, and to make it the more upright, inoffensive, and holy.”
Resource
Only God can transform our hearts.
Okay. I must have put this in the draft document to try to figure out later what it said. It was too many words. I got lost in the middle.
Elaine-speak. God is all about transforming us, which happens in our minds. It isn’t about our understanding everything. It isn’t even about a great fix by worldly standards.
It is to remove sin from our lives. It is to make us more like God.
“In man, at the first, there was a perfect law en-graven on the tablet of his heart, and it is there still; and though shattered the tablet, and blotted is the writing, man knows far more than he fancies; he knows more what he ought to do, and what he ought not to do, than he will admit; he has a conscience within him, and this is from God."
Resource
As we were made in God’s image, God’s laws and commandments, though shattered, are still written on our hearts.
At the first? What does that mean?
Remember that we are made in God’s image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth’” (Gen. 1: 26 ESV).
Glossary
God made us like Himself. After Adam sinned, we are also made in his sinful image.
But God’s image is still there.
Glossary
When we accept God’s gift of salvation, the law is written on our hearts once again. Stowell said God’s law is very understandable to His disciples because it is based on love.
“A principle of rectitude, or purity, must influence the heart. Now nothing can change and effectually renew the heart, but Divine grace."
Resource
Only God can purify our hearts.
In order to be like God again, we must have a pure heart. No, we aren’t totally capable of doing that while we are in these physical bodies.
But we are working on it. It is called sanctification.
Sanctification is the transformation of mind, body, and soul, which begins with regeneration, gradually changes our nature and morals through the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and ends with perfected state of spiritual wholeness or completeness.
- Regeneration is being changed from spiritually dead to spiritually alive and the internal requickening in us that God brings about through the work of the Holy Spirit to give us new character.
- Spiritual death is the separation from God that occurred as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s original sin. The spiritually alive are those who have ABCDed, so they are no longer separated from God.
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to
live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Glossary
Only God can sanctify us. Only He can save us. He does this by the Holy Spirit applying God’s truth to our hearts.
Making the Connections
Our hearts have to change after conversion. We have to get God’s laws and commandments written on the tablets of our heart again.
When we do that, our hearts are purified.
Unfortunately, we are still in these physical bodies. We continue to sin.
How Do We Apply This?
This year, we are going to work on getting our hearts pure. That will entail getting God’s laws and commandments down to the heart level.
Father God. We thank You that You love us so much to offer us the Plan of Salvation after we disobeyed You. You call us to change our hearts. Help us this year to have hearts such as Yours. Amen.
What do you think?
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