Dear People Who Keep Company with God,
God has created us to be passionate people. One of the reasons worship is so important is because it is the highest way we express passion and nothing undermines passion more than a hard heart. A hard heart is basically a heart that is more sensitive to other things than God. Jesus directly addressed the characteristics of a hard heart after the miracle of feeding the 4000.
And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened heart? 18 “Having eyes, do you not see? And having ears, do you not hear? And do you not remember?” Mark 8:17-18.
So the four characteristics of a hard heart are: 1. The inability to see into the spiritual realm. 2. The inability to understand spiritual things 3. The inability to hear what the Spirit is saying. 4. The inability to remember spiritual truths. Over the years, God has dealt with me concerning the condition of my own heart and I want to share three keys that have helped me in cultivating a soft and sensitive heart toward God.
First, the Bible tells us that our hearts are “hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Hebrews 3:13. I believe sin has a built-in judgment; when we sin we lose the ability to perceive the spiritual realm. Jesus’ foundational message of the kingdom is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Matthew 4:17. If the kingdom is here and now, then it is in the invisible realm. Being at hand simply means that it is within our reach. Without repentance we will never see the invisible world that is right in front of us and we will live our life like the rest of unredeemed mankind stuck with only what our natural senses tell us. I love the way the Message Bible addresses this; “You’re blessed when you get your inside world — your mind and heart — put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. Matthew 5:8. Only the blood of Christ can make us right on the inside.
Second, the Bible tells us there will be times when we must “Sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness; break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the LORD until He comes to rain righteousness on you.” Hosea 10:12. Fallow ground is ground that has been worked but has lain dormant for a while and has a crusty outer shell on it. The fallow ground speaks of our heart. In the natural you can neither sow into nor reap from fallow ground. Spiritually this speaks of receiving and giving. The parable of the talents is an illustration of this. When God gives us something He expects it to bear fruit in our lives. When we stop giving or receiving, our hearts become fallow and we lose the ability to perceive the spiritual realm.
The third way our hearts get hardened has to do with personal communion with the Father. “for they had not gained any insight from the incident of the loaves, but their heart was hardened.” Mark 6:52. The wordhardened refers to a hardness that comes from work, like a callous on our hands. If you read all of Mark 6 you will see that Jesus sent the disciples out and they were doing miracles, healings, etc. and when they returned Jesus told them to take a rest (Mark 6:7-12, 30-32). He was not saying go to Myrtle Beach for a week, although, that is a good thing to do. He was saying your heart has been worked hard and has become calloused and you are losing your ability to perceive the spiritual realm. Go get with the Father and rest in His presence and the callous will fall off and your perception will return.
The disciples never took that rest and wound up in a storm and were not able to deal with the situation because they could not connect spiritually. If they had been able to perceive spiritually, the miracle of feeding 5000 people would have given them insight as to the power of the person who told them to get in the boat and row across to the other side. It is not just in ministry situations that we need the ability to connect with the invisible, but also in the storms of life that we are facing more and more each day.
Many Blessings, BW