Whole Heart
“You keep Your covenant of mercy with Your servants who are faithful to You with their whole heart.”
God will keep His covenant of mercy with those who are faithful with their whole heart. It’s hard to be truly faithful with any less. You can’t be faithful with your whole heart and shout obscenities at the driver who cut you off. You can’t be faithful with your whole heart and be envious of your best friends. You can’t be faithful with your whole heart and worship your finances. Gals, I love God so much, and yet, I do all these things. #Facepalm
Sisters, loving God and being faithful to Him is not just something we do during prayer time. It’s not just something we whip out when we’re around our Christian friends or when it’s convenient. Faithful love is an all-day, every day, can’t eat, can’t sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over-the-fence, World Series kind of love (It Takes Two, anyone?) because faithful love doesn’t come in a nice, little pre-packaged box.
Faithful love only comes in one size. Whole.
My whole life. My whole self. My whole heart. Faithful love means belonging to Him: fully and completely. Faithful love isn’t just being nice, and it’s not just loving ourselves and others when it’s comfortable. It means choosing Him when it’s inconvenient and when it hurts and when giving our whole selves means giving Him the broken parts, too.
If God is going to get our whole heart, we can’t just be on our best behavior in front of Him - we have to be willing to bring Him the best and the worst of ourselves. The only true way we can love Him with our whole hearts is to take ownership of the good, the bad, and the ugly before Him - to acknowledge our anger and our apathy, our lust and our laziness, our disappointment and our dirty little secrets.
Sisters, if you have the courage to bare your whole heart to Him, before you know it, He will transform the ugly to beautiful, the bad to better, and the good to great. Before you know it, God will transform your whole heart - because He’ll give you His.
Father,
Thank You for allowing us to bare our whole hearts before You. Thank You for choosing us even though we fail and sin. Thank You for loving me through all my shortcomings and loving my whole heart.
God, please teach us how to bring our whole selves to You. Teach us how to ask You about our broken parts - help us to have the courage to be wrong. Show us how to be humble enough to talk to You about our weaknesses.
God, we love You. We want to be like You with our whole hearts - help us get there. Amen.