What is the condition of your heart right now?
I’m not talking about the physical condition, although that is extremely important. Today, I would like to us to focus on the inward condition of our heart.
How often do we take time to consider what condition our heart is in? Because we can keep things hidden, we might be deceived into believing that we can hide the true condition of our heart. Even though we may try to hide away and protect our heart the true nature of what we are thinking and feeling often comes out.
If we take stock of the way we respond to things and what we say there are indicators of what is going on inside. Rick Warren describes the heart as being like a carport. A carport is designed to hold a car but many of us have a carport so full of junk there is no room for the car.
So, I want to ask you, what are you filling your carport with?
Lots of things can fill our heart and I want to list a couple of things that could be taking up the space.
Sorrow Pain from the past can cause incredible damage to our heart. If that pain is not dealt with it can turn to bitterness. It can also cause us to close ourselves off from others for self-protection.
Unforgiveness By not working through hurts we have experienced and coming to a point of forgiveness we are held captive by those situations. We are unable to be free to move on when unforgiveness is in our heart.
Anger and Hatred Both anger and hatred are like a disease to our heart. If left undealt with they continue to grow and take over. This bitterness rots like cancer and prevents us from having space for good things.
All of these things that can occupy our heart are heavy. The comforting thing is that God is willing and able to help us remove them. Often these things cannot be dealt with in an earthly way: we need the supernatural power of go to reach deep into those places and heal us.
Over the past few weeks I have been helping to clean out our carport. Our real carport! Over time things had accumulated and accumulated. It was dirty, chaotic and full of creepy crawlies! I didn’t want to touch it at all. But as I began to remove things and organise things, I began to feel better. I could see what was there. I was then able to deal with the junk and clean up the mess. It wasn’t long before my carport no longer looked like an unorganised mess but a clean and well-groomed functional area. The great thing was, that after I had organised things the area became a lot more functional.
I wonder if it is the same with our heart? When we take time to deal with the dirty, disorganised things in our heart we will begin to breathe again. Where we once felt numb, we will start to flourish again.
What about considering the condition of your heart today and see if there is any junk you need to get out of the carport. Take that junk to God and ask Him to help you remove it. You may even want to get someone else to come alongside you as you journey this through. Don’t miss the opportunity to get that carport clean so that you are functioning freely again.
Lord, Can You please show me the condition of my heart right now. Lord, will You help me to clean out this junk so that I can walk in freedom again. Amen
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