Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Heart - V

God loves people. As people turn to God, they focus their hearts toward him. God focuses his heart back to people, and he fills their hearts with love, grace and healing.

As our hearts are changed, our lives are changed. We have new values, new priorities, new goals, and new patterns. There is an overflow into the lives of people around.

But there are barriers. Our flesh is naturally antagonistic because of the original man and woman's choice to sin. (A deliberate move of heart focus.) The enemy knows of this linkage between heart focus and grace. His desire to bring misery to everyone will motivate him to disrupt our heart focus any way he can. Barriers can also be built from within.

Our heart is built by all the ideas we ever had, all the words we ever heard or spoke, and all the experiences we have ever gone through. Experiences can cause us to make promises to ourselves. For example, many people grow up with cruel, abusive fathers. Because of wrong treatment by their fathers, they conclude that "father-ness" is bad. They conclude that if a person connects to "father-ness" in anyway, bad things will happen. So, they make a promise to themselves to have nothing to do with "father-ness" in any form ... including their infitiely loving, heavenly Father. This promise becomes a barrier to their heart focus. Which, in turn, blocks the flow of love and grace to them. Which stops the healing of their hearts, and the fruit that results.

There are, of course, numerous barriers. And, because of God's goals and purposes for our lives, he spends significant time and energy trying to get us to see and address these barriers. And other forces work to cover our eyes, and to strengthen these barriers.

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