We see hearts everywhere this month. In Scripture, the English word for heart appears in at least 878 references. Seems that God is directly pointing to every heart. Matthew 22:37 is where Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind…” The phrase “with all your heart” is used many times in the Bible. So, I would invite you to become a Valentine of God’s Agape love, and here’s how….
People may say, “trust your heart,” but God says: “The heart is deceitful above all things and it is extremely sick; Who can understand it fully and know its secret motives” (Jeremiah 17:9). Bad attitudes and actions all start in the heart and they can precede acts of sin and wrongdoing, because the heart can deceive even the best of us. And if left to go on it’s own merry way without the intervention of God’s Agape-love, our hearts will become hardened and even unreachable by the Truth. God defines his own terms, and we need to know how God defines True Love…
God gave us all a heart because we were created to be in relationship with him and one another forever. With the heart we learn to accept and share God’s gift of perfect Agape-love, which is far different than all types of human loves, such as “Philios” friendship/kinship, or “Eros” erotic kinds of love. The heart must be transformed by the gift of repentance and be born again (John 3), by turning to faith and trust in Christ’s death on the Cross for salvation’s gift to be given.
The heart will reveal one’s true character, as Jesus says: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; A good man out of the good treasure of the heart, brings forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure of the heart, brings forth evil things” (Matthew 12:34-35). The heart is not only involved with what comes out of our mouths, it shows who we really are.
Only God can create within us a new heart. In fact, God longs to give us grace so that such a new heart might enjoy his eternal blessings. God’s perfect Agape love is for us, while we were deceived by sin. Agape moved God to give His only begotten Son Jesus to die in our place, to pay for our sins. But, before we can have our hearts made new, we must experience a change; we need a contrite and broken heart being drawn by the Holy Spirit to repent. And such a huge change is not normal. A new heart is a supernatural creation by our great Creator God. To repent means that we turn away from our sins, and we turn to Christ as our Savior and Lord.
President Abraham Lincoln understood the deception of our hearts when he wrote this in his March 1863 Proclama-tion: “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”
Pray for God’s Agape Love to recreate your heart in Jesus Christ the Lord;
Be God’s Valentine!
Pastor Jonathan Singleton
First Methodist Church of Clewiston