love

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What Fills the Heart

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Isaiah 29:13 which states, “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” and since it’s Valentine’s Day, the day we all like to give our hearts away, I thought I’d share my ponderings. So, just what exactly is a “far away” heart, what does it mean?  It means not near, estranged and lacking in closeness, distant. When we are distant from someone, we do not hear them, we do not feel them, and we do not see them.

The Message translates this verse like this: “These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their hearts aren’t in it. Because they act like they’re worshiping me but don’t mean it,” and goes on to translate verse 14 as, “I’m going to step in and shock them awake, astonish them, stand them on their ears. The wise ones who had it all figured out will be exposed as fools. The smart people who thought they knew everything will turn out to know nothing.” This verse is so fascinating to me, because it seems to speak on so many levels. It’s about what fills our hearts and the actions that stem from our beliefs. It’s also about hypocrisy, about saying one thing while doing another. It’s about arrogance and pride and bearing false witness.

A far away heart means being unaware of what is in your heart, not knowing what you accept as true or why you accept it, not loving others as you would be loved, and trusting in God, but not trusting Him. Others may not know what is truly in our hearts, but God knows, and he can tell if we are near or far, if our hearts are filled with his love or something else entirely. One thing I know for sure is this: Whether we realize it or not, we live where our hearts are, holding in them all that we value, all that we hope for, all that is dear to us, and no matter what our lips say, or what we declare, our actions are always, always in accordance with our true beliefs, with what fills the heart.

May your heart always be close to God’s and filled with His love today and always…

~SLM

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Deuteronomy #2: Love is the Answer

If we could summarize God’s law in just a few words, those words would be this: Love is the answer. In Deuteronomy 6:5 we are told, “and you shall love the lord your God with all our heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength,” and this is the heart of the law, the foundation, the fulcrum upon which all else balances.  1 John 4:16, states, “And so we know and rely on the love that God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him,” and Christ tells us this in Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

It’s by following God’s laws, we show our love, we tether ourselves to Him, giving over our hearts, trusting with total abandon, and in return we experience His faithful and steadfast devotion. Romans 13:8 states this; “let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.”

The song “Love is the Answer” is stuck in my head, and like a broken record that keeps skipping and repeating these words keep playing in my head:

Light of the world, shine on me

Love is the answer

Shine on us all, set us free

Love is the answer…

And when you feel afraid…Love one another
When you’ve lost your way…Love one another

When you’re all alone …Love one another
When you’re far from home…Love one another

When you’re down and out…Love one another
All your hope’s run out…Love one another

When you need a friend…Love one another
When you’re near the end, love
We got to love, we got to love one another

Funny how god uses whomever he wishes to bring his Word to us, and I wonder how quickly Todd Rundgren wrote this song, and if he felt the power of the Spirit upon him when he did.

~SLM

And in case you’ve never heard, or don’t remember it…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QZjJU-mtFU

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A Prayer for Love

As if my year-long (and I suspect much longer) commitment to Proverbs wasn’t enough, I’ve recently begun an additional study of Deuteronomy, and this prayer was on my heart this morning…

Heavenly Father, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, fill my heart Your loving presence. Give me ears to hear and eyes to see that I may live in Your commandment, loving you with all my heart, all my soul and all my might. Bind Your love upon my heart so that I may conscientiously talk of it when I sit in my house, when I walk by the way, when I lie down and when I rise up, diligently showing Your love to those I meet through word and deed.  Amen.

~SLM

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Proverbs 3:1-8 It’s a Matter of Trust

At first glance, this chapter seemed to me a repeat of the first 2, a rehashing of the concepts previously discussed. I’m not fond of covering ground twice, so I glanced ahead a few chapters, and I discovered that chapters 1-10 cover a lot of the same principles. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent girl, and I’m not opposed to expounding on a theme, but, on the surface, the reiteration looked rather excessive to me, and had this been a novel, I’d have stopped right there. But this is not a novel, and I have committed myself to this study. I wondered what could be so important. There must be a reason that Solomon found it necessary to repeatedly stress the concepts of faith, love, and the fear of the Lord. I decided to take another tack.

I find that writing verses in my own words can provide insight into their meaning. So I set about writing the verses, praying over their meaning, asking to be given awareness, knowledge, and comprehension of their deeper meaning. And then I slept on it, as is my habit when I’m really engrossed in trying to understand.

This morning, it dawned on me (quite literally, in fact), it’s a matter of trust. Verses 5-6 cover trust, and what my closer look showed me is that until you really, really get the concepts of faith, obedience, love and “fear of the Lord” embedded into your very being, it’s very hard to really, really trust. When we’re children, it’s so easy to trust, but as we grow and mature, we tend to get the trust “experienced” right out of us. We learn to be skeptical, suspicious, and faithless. We have to get the ideas expressed in verses 1-4 so ingrained in us that they are “written on our hearts, as if they are written on stone,” before we can move on to trust. Verses 3-4 are about love and faithfulness, but before love and faithfulness, we have to learn to keep the teachings of wisdom, the commandments of God, which must first be written on our hearts.

Verses 1-2 look more closely at wisdom’s teaching. It’s through the keeping of God’s commands, by writing them on our hearts, that we can remember the teachings of wisdom, and by following wisdom’s guidance, we can live long and prosperous lives. Such a simple concept: Live by God’s commandments, remember them, write them on your heart, and by doing this you open yourself to God’s wisdom, and opening ourselves to wisdom enables us to practice discernment, helping us to consider who we associate with, and how we can live honestly and fairly. Living this way leads to prosperity, not just physical prosperity, but more importantly spiritual prosperity, brought to us through love and faithfulness.

Verses 3-4, to me, convey a very good description of what Christian thought is all about – Love and Faithfulness. They are core concepts and you should be so attached to them that you and they are inseparable, that they become second nature to you, that you express them in everything you do. They are an outcropping of keeping God’s commands and the remembrance of wisdom’s teaching, a natural result listening to the voice of wisdom. By showing love and faithfulness in everything you do, you will find favor with God, and be held in good esteem with him, and by your friends, acquaintances, and mankind.

And all this leads to trust. It’s all about trust. Trust God with all your heart, with all your being. What does this mean? I think that it means to be able to say “Lord, I know you see this situation, and while I have no idea how it could ever resolve itself, I know that you do, and I’m putting the ball in your court, you take, because I know and have faith that you can and will provide for it and work it out according to your plan.”

And, after all that, verses 7-8 warn us about the importance of keeping our own greatness in perspective. It reminds us that we shouldn’t think too much of our own genius, because when we get caught up in our own idea of how brilliant we are, we are usually setting ourselves up for a little slice of “humble pie.” We should reverence the source of our “wisdom” and give credit where credit is due. By humbly acknowledging that we are merely the channel for God’s spirit, we bring sustenance and strength to our very beings.

It’s funny how, when you really take the time to study something, how much more that can be seen, than when you make only a cursory glance, like seeing the individual threads in the tapestry, and how they work together to make a complete picture, an image that would not appear the same, if just one of the threads were only slightly different.

I guess I had a lot to say about it afterall! 🙂
~SLM