Romans 14: 5
Each person must be fully convinced in his own mind.
Being convinced in our minds is the easiest part. The mind is willing, but our hearts are unconvinced. Have you watched the Disney movie, Frozen? Well, here is another life lesson from my “Everything I learned, I learned from Cartoons” anthology. Of course, last week the Disney movie, Saving Mr. Banks, was not animated, but you get the idea.
One of the central characters in Frozen, Anna, was injured by her sister Elsa’s freeze power. Elsa’s frozen shot hit Anna in the head. Their parents, the Queen and King, rushed Anna to a troll elder for help. The elder encouraged them saying, “You are lucky it wasn’t her heart. The heart is not so easily changed, but the head can be persuaded.”
In this I hear the voice of God speaking. Today, as I refreshed myself on exactly what the troll elder said I quipped to myself, “How is it that a troll knows this, and we do not?” We have fallen into a pattern of intellectual service to God but little engagement with our hearts. Of course, some people are better at engaging their hearts than others. Each of must learn, though, how to persuade our hearts to the Word of God.
I confess, I learned early to study the Bible and I have always enjoyed studying it. I’ve learned a lot too but there was a significant component missing from my Christianity. In 2006 I discovered what was missing. It was a heart connection with the Father. Honestly, this was a challenging time. I had to learn to join to the Father with my spirit. In the deep parts of our being, we have built safety walls and not even God is allowed to penetrate that perimeter. Our tender feelings are safely stored away there as well as what we perceive as dangerous memories and experiences. We learned to lock away everything that makes us tender and certainly anything which makes us vulnerable. So, my Christianity became one of intellectual pursuit. I wasn’t seeking God’s heart. Sometimes I wasn’t even seeking His thoughts. I wanted His Word, His knowledge and His wisdom. Leave my heart out of this and speak to my brain. Can anyone relate to this? You see, I could read the Word and get knowledge from it. I could mentally agree to the ideas and categorize them into their proper place in the file cabinet of my mind. Easy-peasy! That was not good enough for Father though. He wanted into my heart.
Your mind and mine, will accept most of what we read in the Bible and file it comfortably away. The trouble comes when you try to convince your heart that these verses and promises are not facts and intellectual ideas but rather something to embrace with your spirit, something to be believed in your heart and then, implemented. Can I stand on the quaking bluff and defiantly declare that the Lord, my God, is my rock and my strong refuge, and I will not fear! It’s a nice thought, a beautiful verse. It’s a good passage to preach about and even to use to encourage your friends, but . . . is it more than that? Can my heart be persuaded that it is absolute truth? When I use the word absolute in this way I often thing of absolute zero. It is the place of undeniable reality, ultimate truth. Can we take these Bible verses and convince our hearts that they mean what they say? Or, as has become our Christian custom, do we say, “That is not for today, miracles have passed away, that is a promise only to the Jews,” or any of a number of excuses? The Bible says I am healed. My mind says, “Yes, Jesus is our healer.” But my heart knows that I do not really believe that Jesus will heal me even though God’s reality is that He already has healed me. Faith and belief, as a Godly paradigm, demand that I reconcile these concepts.
Your heart is much more powerful than you mind. Your brain takes in a lot of information, but your heart tells it what to do with it. Do we file it away in the vault or do we undertake to integrate it into the very fiber of our being? Most of us smile and nod, smile and nod, but we do not challenge ourselves to take God at His Word. I cannot even imagine how it makes Him feel for us to say, “Yeah, but . . ..” He knows, though, that our mind can accept His challenging ideas but our hearts quake. Truth be told, it takes some guts to get in touch with your inner self. Most of us are too afraid to do it, too afraid to face God’s truths and our realities. What will we find, what will we feel? We’ve done a great job of anesthetizing ourselves so that we don’t have to feel much of anything and then God comes along and says, “Let me live, work and breathe in the very core of your being.” Of course that is scary, but, God is love and we can trust Him. He will always love and accept us. He wants to lead us into abundant life, but fullness of life is for the brave of heart. Everything fabulous comes at a price. The price of this abundant life that Jesus came to the earth to give us is thawing this frozen heart.
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