Journey into Lightl

It may sound strange, but for most of my life I didn’t know I had a heart. I knew I had a physical one. I could feel it beating. But I didn’t know many of my deep feelings, beliefs, and motives.

About thirteen years ago I began a journey in learning how to access my heart and discern what was going on down there. I discovered a messy world of conflicting thoughts and feelings. I thought I believed what I knew in my head, but I began to realize often this was not the case.

We all have a hidden heart that controls us more than we think. We carry into our relationship with God many lies and dependencies leftover from childhood. The world also molds us to live in wrong ways. These false dependencies and lies can still influence us. For example, we are taught to perform well so we can become important. We feel the need to be liked by certain people to be acceptable. We desire to impress to be liked and loved. As Christians, we should know these are lies. Yet, we often live as if they are true at the deep levels of our lives.

We feel confused because what we are believing conflicts with what God tells us in the Bible and what we know in our heads. He says we are important, even when we fail. He tells us we are adequate, even when we are rejected. And he reassures us we are loved, even when we don’t impress.

But because we often don’t examine ourselves, this unbelief is not detected and dealt with. Thus, with our words and actions we deceive ourselves into thinking we are living a transformed life of love and power, but in reality, we are still bogged down in the old ways.

How do we access our hearts to know what we believe and rely on?

One thing we need to do is to slow down daily to clear our minds and listen for the voice of God deep within. We can ask the Holy Spirit to “Search me, oh God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way (Psalm 139:23,24, NASB).

It is in being silent we may detect the thoughts and feeling we didn’t know we had. Our feelings are useful in discerning what we are relying on. If we feel fear, we are probably not believing God is protecting us. If we are feeling troubled, we may be heading in the wrong direction. If we feel depressed, we may have lost hope of deliverance from a painful situation.

It’s important to remember our feelings do not necessarily tell us what is true about life. But they can tell us a lot about ourselves. We may discover the reason we are fearful is we are relying too much on ourselves. However, the truth about life is God promises to enable us to endure and overcome the challenges. By discovering we are anxious, we can pray and be transformed as we shift our dependency off ourselves and onto God (Philippians 4:5-6).

May we not run from our hearts, but learn to access and know what is in them. This can be the first step in becoming more like Jesus. Let’s remember the condition of our hearts is what measures our spiritual maturity, not what we know.