Day 42 – Undivided Hearts

Monday September 3

Ken shut the door and sank into the chair in his office.  He was so tired.  Not just physically tired, he was tired in his soul.  Just when it seemed like he had learned how to master one area in his life, three new things popped up.  Some days he felt like the ball in a pinball machine – wildly careening from one emotional reaction to another.  “Lord, this can’t be the way you meant us to live”.

As he prayed, suddenly an image flashed before his eyes.  He saw himself as a puppet, with many strings attached. What were those things called again?  Oh yeah, a marionette, he thought silently. 

As he watched, a pair of enormous scissors appeared and deftly cut through every string.  Then the still small voice of the Holy Spirit spoke inside His heart – “Ken that is what I’m going to do - I’m going to cut off every string of the enemy that controls your heart; I’m going to silence every voice that is not Mine.”

Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Proverbs 4:23

When we surrendered our lives to Christ, our hearts became His possession – not to rent but to own.  Because of this, the enemy cannot be a rightful owner of any “real estate’ in our heart.  But that does not mean he does not try to take up residence anyway.  The enemy tries to set up squatter camps on our “heart land” from which he can begin to broadcast his lies about who God is, who we are in Him and who others are.  But because he has no legal right, this can only happen when we give him that permission.

We give the enemy permission when we don’t take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:6), allowing voices other than the voice of the Good Shepherd to speak into our lives. These voices are easily identifiable; anything not in alignment with the word of God should be treated with immediate suspicion.  We submit these “suspicious voices” to people we trust so that through the wisdom of corporate hearing we can together discern the true voice of the Lord and be protected from any blind spots in our lives.

On paper this is a seemingly simple process – take thoughts captive, judge them, submit them, discern them.  So why is it then, that so many of us struggle with the enemy’s strongholds in our hearts and minds? 

We struggle because the heart is not an organ of logic, it is an organ of passion and emotion.  And hearts get wounded.

If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him. But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of God.  Psalm 55:12-14

Relational pain is some of the deepest pain we experience as human beings.  When we are in pain, our natural instinct is to do anything we can do to make the pain stop; the greater the intensity of the pain, the greater the desperation to cause it to cease.  It is in this place of vulnerability that the enemy most often makes his move.  “If you just close your heart, the pain will stop”.   “If you leave this church, the pain will go away”.  “Your wife is the source of all these problems, you should divorce her, imagine how much better you will feel.”  “God doesn’t want you or love you – you should just kill yourself”.   

Accepting these lies is tantamount to releasing a place in our hearts to the residence of darkness.  As we do, suddenly perspectives become distorted, attitudes twisted and the heart begins to function in misguided ways, in opposition to the truth that we know. 

Just as in the natural body cancer cells migrate to places of weakness or wounding, so the enemy will migrate to the places in our hearts and spirits where there are unaddressed wounds. If there is to be a silencing of the voices of the enemy and a true clarity of voice of the Lord in our lives, we must allow the Lord to heal our wounds and remove these jurisdictions of the enemy.

Right now God has opened a window of grace through which He is filling our hearts with the light of His Word to expose darkened areas.  With the precision of the most accomplished heart surgeon, He is cutting away the lies – the squatter camps – by circumcision.  Through the revelation of His divine nature and amazing love for us,  He is pouring in the balm of Gilead – the anointing oil of healing -  binding up our broken hearts so we can be secure against the enemy.

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.  Isaiah 61:1

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. Psalm 147:3

The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18

As we come through this process of circumcision and healing, the goal is that we would walk before Him with whole and undivided hearts. 

I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God.  Ezekiel 11:19-20

God is preparing us to enter the Promised Land and He knows for us to possess our inheritance we need to be following the Captain of the Hosts wholeheartedly.  We can only do this when our hearts are freed from the domains of fear or unbelief or doubt.

Moses said to the Gadites and Reubenites, "Shall your countrymen go to war while you sit here? Why do you discourage the Israelites from going over into the land the LORD has given them? This is what your fathers did when I sent them from Kadesh Barnea to look over the land. After they went up to the Valley of Eshcol and viewed the land, they discouraged the Israelites from entering the land the LORD had given them.  The LORD's anger was aroused that day and he swore this oath: 'Because they have not followed me wholeheartedly, not one of the men twenty years old or more who came up out of Egypt will see the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--  not one except Caleb son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite and Joshua son of Nun, for they followed the LORD wholeheartedly.' The LORD's anger burned against Israel and he made them wander in the desert forty years, until the whole generation of those who had done evil in his sight was gone.  Numbers  32:6-13

This is a new day and we are about to see His kingdom established in ways we have not seen before.  God is repositioning and realigning us not only with His will but with His heart so that there will be a purity in the expression of His church as His kingdom is being advanced on this earth.

Today the Lord is asking us – are we willing to open up our hearts to Him, in complete vulnerability, that He might bind up our brokenness?  If the answer is yes, let’s pray this prayer together.

God, I thank you that you are a God who is near to all those who are brokenhearted.  Lord today I choose to open my heart to You again afresh.  I know the human heart is desperately wicked and I realize that even I can’t know my own heart.  But You can.   Lord I ask You to shine the light of Your truth into My heart to reveal wounds that have been left unattended and places where the enemy has set up his encampments of lies.  God for every area that you expose, I say I want You to tear it down O God. I want my heart to belong wholly to You.  Teach me Your way and I will walk in Your truth, give me an undivided heart, that I may fear Your name.  In the mighty name of Jesus, I pray.  Amen!