It’s With Our Heart We Believe

And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:5 NIV)
For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. (Romans 10:10 NIV)

We have seen over the past few weeks how the heart is not only central to who we are, it's where all our important relationships live. We relate to our husband or wife from the heart, we relate to our children from the heart, we relate to our close friends from the heart. Whilst I have a genuine care for the clients in my accountancy practice, our relationship is much more one of the mind as they are paying for me to impart my knowledge to them. Life-giving relationships are all rooted in the heart.

There are things we understand with our mind and that is good and right. But we do not relate to God with our mind, we have a heart to heart connection with him. Too often we admit to knowing the love of God in our mind and wonder when it will drop from there into our heart. It’s a question I’m often asked and I now believe it is the wrong question. God pours his love directly into our heart not into our mind in the hope that one day it might find its way into the heart. Many of us have learned to believe with our mind which leads to us rationalising everything. When we believe with our heart we will be transformed.

Opening our heart requires faith as we learn to trust our Father’s goodness and kindness towards us. As we open our heart we find that he puts his finger on some blockages or hindrances to receiving which he wants to remove. Opening our heart and seeking to keep it open is a doorway for us to go through as we seek to live in love. An open heart is a container for his love, the more open it is the bigger the container will become.

As we open our heart to his love we will start to live differently. We create a new wineskin that he fills with his love.