Places of the Heart

A pure heart is not something for the faint of heart to try and obtain. When God does His purifying, He has got to use fire to get our hard spots the right consistency to be cleaned and then poured out. Consistency matters in everything from making batters for cakes to how thick our oil is in our cars……wrong consistency, wrong outcome. What we are made of and how we are put together needs overhauling by the Holy Spirit. Most of us have a history, some worse than others, but we all have portions of our hearts that need remolding, renewing, and realignment. Underneath the umbrella of our heart is our mind and emotions. These are two huge areas that need continual work so the fruit from them lines up with and agrees with God. When God begins the work of decontamination of our heart, He is reaching into our minds touching all that we think about, choices we make, and memories we have. All these places of the heart need to be addressed one at a time. God has to work line upon line and precept upon precept b/c---for all you builders out there---you know unless the foundation is laid properly, the house will not be stable. God has to take what we give Him to work with. He is not going to cross our will—He is going to wait until we give the 'places of our heart' to Him to deal with. This enables Him to build the house properly so it is safe and useful. Our heart is His home. That means our thoughts are where He resides, our emotions are where He lives----so this begs the question, what kind of a house are we giving the Lord to live in? Are we telling Him, hey this is how I am, this is my personality, and You can come in, but don't change anything around in here. I am comfortable with the way all the furniture of my thoughts and feelings are arranged, so You adapt to me and my ways. If this is the case, we won't see God. Not clearly, anyhow. Maybe through the Word, or others, but seeing His heart and reacting to it at a moments notice will be out of our reach to us unless we allow Him to come into the places of our heart and make it to His liking. Where we can see Him and be available to say what He wants said in the middle of an argument, and reach out with a hug when your entire being wants to punch someone's lights out! When we see Him, we are able to observe in the spiritual plane what His reactions to each and every situation would be, and then do what He wants done in that situation. That is seeing Him, and that is impossible with a contaminated heart. A contaminated heart wants its ways over God's ways. It is a heart that may say with its lips—I love You Lord, all I want is You God and Your will for me, but it is far from Him. Jesus complained of this while here on earth. He said---"These people praise me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me". God is not looking for our mouths to say the right things; He is looking for a heart that is surrendered, piece by piece to Him, and out of the abundance of that surrender the heart will speak the right things. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. We've got it backwards, people. We try to speak things into existence when God wants to change our hearts so we can see Him and then speak out what we have seen!
More later…..