Unlimited: God Focuses on the Heart
Dec 2, 2021 1061
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21, NIV).
It’s natural for us to focus on the externals—things we can see, hear, touch, and try to control. However, the teachings of Jesus overwhelmingly focus on the heart. Jesus directly and consistently rebuked those whose religious teachings were focused on the externals.
Jesus knew that a transformed heart leads to a transformed life, and never the other way around. He taught a Gospel that emphasised God’s radical love for his wayward children. It is a love that can melt and transform the hardest heart. From such a heart will come the kind of Kingdom life that pleases God.
If the heart is right with God, the rest will follow.
Without a radical transformation of the heart, the externals are meaningless, and even dangerous in the extreme. To focus on any other kind of “gospel” is to be like the white-washed sepulchres of the Pharisees—seemingly nice and shiny on the outside, but putrid and stinking of corruption on the inside (Matthew 23:27–28). Jesus was very clear that what defiles us is not the externals, but those things that come out from our hearts (Matthew 15:1–20; Matthew 23:27–28).
If your heart is right with God, the rest will follow. If it isn’t, then you will struggle all your life, attempting to live a life that you will never be able to live. And you will lose your soul.– Eliezer Gonzalez
Reflection: What are the areas of your life that need to be transformed? Go on your knees, and make a mental list of these areas. Now yield them to Christ in repentance and faith. And then, be faithful and diligent with your life, and wait patiently for God.
Republished with permission from Blogs.crossmap.com, featuring inspiring Bible verses aboutUnlimited: God Focuses On The Heart | Good News Unlimited.
