www.bible.com/1713/mat.5.8.csb
As I just related to my group, Jeremiah 17:9 says that the heart is deceitful above all things, who can know it? The truth is that our heart is the most impure of all things in our flesh and the most corrupted? Does this mean we all need cardiac care? Consider that the heart in the Biblical world was the realm of thoughts and feelings. We might call it the mind, or even the subconscious. The memory and workings of this body are held in the brain, but the heart, or the soul if you will, is where we live. It is the totality of us. This is the heart that drives us or pulls us down. This is the heart where we lives and feel and be. So, as we might expect, it is the one place where we need saving. Only God can know the heart. We lie, often to ourselves, about who we are or are trying to be. We often don’t know who we are. Sometimes we see and remember things that are long buried, so painful that we don’t bring them to mind, but they remain there, are part of us, provoking us to actions we don’t understand. Some say deep level psychological regressive therapy is the answer. They are on the right track, but we simply don’t know enough about the inner workings of our own being.
If you are a computer person, like myself, you know how to turn on the computer, type a few things, make it do the stuff you want. But if it breaks, I’m kind out of luck. Now I know enough about turning it off and turning it back on, but I need my computer to be reliable. I just don’t know enough about it to be able to fix. Likewise, I think we all have a pretty good handle on how to run ourselves. We know what turns us on and what turns us off. We know what we like and what we don’t. But honestly, when things don’t work right, we don’t know enough about ourselves to fix the problem, or we won’t admit that we have a problem.
When you get to a problem you can’t fix, you call the manufacturer or tech support. When you have a problem in your soul, you call God. We call this prayer. We have also been supplied with a technical manual, called the Bible. While you may not understand the whole thing (who can?), you will be able to understand enough to get you moving again. For only God knows the heart. Only God can change the heart. He knows what’s going on under the hood and knows what screw to tighten to get the whole thing working again. You just have to be willing to let Him work on it. That means taking yourself to the repair shop, submitting your soul for inspection and scrutiny, and admitting to the mistakes that made the soul go wrong in the first place. This is called confession. Repentance is both feeling sorry for what you’ve done but also a strong compulsion to resist doing those things again that broke you.
And yes there are sometimes things in our soul that are there through no fault of our own. Things have been done to us, and they too have broken us. We submit these things to the repair shop as well, because God knows what’s wrong and can fix it, but we have to be willing to submit these things as well to Him. We cannot hold on to pain as if we had some right to it, some right to be angry at someone for what they did. We really don’t need that pain and resentment, because that causes corrosion and corruption. It makes us do bad things for “good” reasons.
As you can see, purity of the heart isn’t overnight. In fact, it takes some time, but there is profound blessing for those who find it. Such purity can only be found in proximity to the Lord above. Only in close fellowship with Jesus can we see such purity. My prayer for you today is that you can find it.
Blessed Lord, take my hand and my heart today. Help me find some purity. Lord I need that purity in my heart. Let it be Your throne room, a place of honor in my breast, where You may live and lead me through all the storms of life. Help me grow Lord into someone worthy of bearing Your Name. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Meritt Musings 