Heart

The church and Christians, we refer to ourselves as the 'body of Christ' and as being 'Christ-like.' But I wonder if we really understand what that means, what it even is to live so caught up and surrendered to Jesus' love and grace that it consumes us and we become more like him. As I've spoken some on faith and a lot about loving others and how we need to show our faith in actions, I've also been really coming to realize that we can not be the hands and feet of God if we don't have our hearts so consumed in his. I've realised that so many times I'm quick to jump into being 'his' hands and feet and doing and going all 'for him' that I lose sight of the grace that enables me to do anything, I've realized that often I think that it's all about what I can do for him, how much I can work. It's crazy that I've actually caught myself doing things in an effort to please and earn what I've been freely given by my Father, I know so much better if I would slow down enough to just ponder this amazing love He has for me.



So my point in all of this is, how many times do we get so caught up in the look of God's heart instead of actually getting into His heart and love 'till that spills into our lives? If the heart of the church is not God's heart, how can we be his hands and feet? In James chapter 2, it talks about how the body without the spirit is dead and goes onto say that faith without deeds is dead. The church without the Father's heart is dead, the church without the Spirit of God is going to be dead. We can't be the hands and feet of him until we have his pulse to give life to our hands and feet, without his Spirit living in us we can't be alive in Him. In John 15 Jesus tells us that He is the vine, and that every branch that does not bear fruit will be cut off. And get this, here's such a simple and basic thing that we often just totally forget, "Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." (John 15:4)
It's so easy to let these human logic's get in our way. I've went through a Genesis study in school this year and I know that I've always before totally missed the fact that the temptation Adam and Eve faced was from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After thousands of years it really hasn't changed much, we still want to do things our own ways with our own knowledge instead of relying on God. It's so easy to only see what's right in front of us in the human sense rather than surrender our flesh and let the Spirit open our eyes to God's kingdom. But we can't have it both ways, we can't get to God through our knowledge and our actions, we can't share the love of Christ with the world just by copying nice things he did for people. We've got to reach down in our hearts and souls and give it all up, let the sacrifice of Christ wash away the self and the old ways of sin so that the love of God can take over in our lives. "Remain in me, and I will remain in you." It's not going to be easy for us to to remain in Christ, we are born into the flesh and sin so it's going to take waking up every day and choosing Christ and surrendering self. We've got to continually press into the amazing love of our Father and the grace He's pouring down, Jesus isn't going to stay where He isn't welcome anymore, where our own motives and ways of following him are taking first in our hearts rather than the Spirit's lead. But if we deny ourselves and chose to remain in him, he will remain with us and show us how to live and be the body of Christ.

Alright, so all of that to basically just say that if we are going to bear Love's heart we've gotta know him first.