How's your heart health?

The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

This phrase from Luke 6:45 popped into my mind the other day. However, rather than it being about condemnation and judgement, I felt God showing me that it was an opportunity, a key to connect with God. I felt Him saying,

“Listen to what comes out of your mouth. It will give you an idea of what is going on in your heart. If there is anything that’s not great, it’s an indicator of something going on in your heart that needs attention. You now have the opportunity to bring that part of your heart to Me for healing and restoration.”

We all need to listen to what comes out of our mouth. Is it frustration and negativity? Bitterness? Annoyance and anger? Hurt, malice, discord, even hatred? James tells us, “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing...this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring…can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.” (James 3:9-12, NIV)

If we believe we have God’s Holy Spirit in us, what comes out of our mouths should reflect this. Galatians 5 gives us a great idea of what this looks like:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

How wonderful is our God that He gives us the opportunity for transformation, to become more like Him? However, how often do we not take this opportunity, instead resorting to our same old methods of self-protection and self-preservation?

Hebrews 3 repeatedly quotes a verse from Ps 95 - “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion…”

Why do we harden our hearts?

Again, I believe it is our self-protection. Right from our early years we experience hurt, disappointment, anger, frustration at some point. We learn that the world is not safe, that other people are not safe, and so, we find that if we want to feel safe (physically or emotionally), we have to do it for ourselves. Sometimes that is by lashing out ourselves, using our bodies, our voice or our words. Others learn it is safer to hide away. We might do a mixture of both. However we protect ourselves, it leads to walls around our hearts, or even callouses. We harden our hearts because we believe the lie that it will protect us from further pain.

Today is an opportunity. I believe that today, right now, where you are, God wants to bring healing to your heart, to take you to another level in freedom.

When we come to a place of worship, it is an interface, a place where we not only get to give God the praise and glory due to Him, but a place where He meets us. We cannot do this properly from a place where we are not prepared to be vulnerable, open and honest with Him. As scary as it can seem, when we lay all our pain, hurt and brokenness out on the table for Him to see, it is the place where healing, wholeness and freedom can come.

The invitation right now is for you to do this with God, either as I sing over you, or put on some quiet worship and spend your own time with Him. The reality is, we cannot fix ourselves. If you have stuff coming out of your mouth and heart that you know is unhelpful, unhealthy, that you know you want change in, now is the time. He can and He will – His desire is for your wholeness. After all, that’s why Jesus came, died and rose again – so you can be free.

This is a photo I took the other morning, where I saw what looked to me like a giant mouth in the sky. The words that came with it were, “The heavens declare the glory of the Lord”. Let our words, hearts and lives also reflect His glory more and more!

“The heavens declare the glory of the Lord”

(Backing track is from WORSHIP - DEEP INSTRUMENTAL WORSHIP - (NO COPYRIGHT MUSIC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fixZNIFIbs&t=305s)

I will give You my heart, Jesus, but I don’t want to…

Hearts have been on my radar more recently, popping into my vision in weird ways, as shown in these photos. They are reminding me of a time in my journey where I “foolishly” asked Jesus if there was anything He wanted me to bring to Him for healing. His response: “Would you bring Me your broken heart?” Seems fairly innocuous, doesn’t it? After all, the idea of “giving our hearts to Jesus” is fairly prevalent in Christian circles.

But I was shocked.

Shocked by the fact that He would need to ask, and even more shocked by the fact that I was really struggling with actually giving it to Him. Don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to! I was scared and I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I was ready to trust Him with my heart. After all, it had taken a fair battering over the years and was only just getting some healing. I wasn’t ready to risk getting hurt again.

And yet…and yet…I had been learning that Jesus is trustworthy. He had brought such healing into my life, such transformation to the way I functioned and viewed the world. And so, with tears streaming down my face, with trembling and uncertainty, I pushed through and said, “Yes…Yes, I WILL give You my heart!”, with all the strength I could muster. It felt so right, but so hard at the same time. It wasn’t pain free or fear free. However, something shifted from that time. My shell of self-protection was dissolving. In its place, I was learning to live under the protection of the Most High. It is a position that doesn’t always “feel” safe, but in reality, no where else is safer.

So, in these images of hearts that have literally been in my path, I feel there is an invitation for anyone else who is in need of some heart healing:

For those who feel their heart is torn, left abandoned, lost and far from home;

For those whose heart has become dried out, brittle, prickly and hard;

For those whose heart seems half buried under the weight of sorrows, of the stones and dirt thrown at them, or just the burden of life…

Or anyone else who is struggling to trust again, struggling to even breathe, there is an invitation to bring your heart in whatever state you find it to the gentle Shepherd, the King of kings, the Healer. He is trustworthy and faithful and if you let Him, He will not only protect your heart - taking care of it as the precious jewel that it is to Him - but He will heal and restore you, too! All you have to do is say, “YES!”

**The song “O Come to the Altar”, by Elevation Worship has been going around my head alongside this post - it is quite powerful. (Click on the link to listen)

If this is something you don’t know how to do, want help with, or want to know more about, please feel free to message me below, via the contact page, or through Facebook.