God wants your heart; do you want Him? At the end of the day, that’s what matters. Why do you do what you do? As a born again believer, you were given a new heart, a new nature. You were given a new ‘want to’. Allow your new ‘want to’ to govern what you do under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. Find underneath the pressure to perform righteousness what you really want. Pause before acting and ask God to help you be honest with Him and with yourself. Underneath the feelings of guilt and the religious pressure of duty is a new ‘want to’. And the new ‘want to’ buried underneath in there, is what God is after. He is not impressed by what we do under the pressures of guilt and condemnation. He knows our heart and what motivates us. If we will remove the ‘have to’ we may realize that we ‘want to’, actually. The latter is what needs to be our motivation. And the latter will be a sweet smelling offering to God offered in faith and love. Understand that God has given you everything you need for life and godliness, “as His divine power has given to us all things that pertainto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.”
Let your new ‘want to’ be the motivation of your heart. Trust the finished work of Christ; that you have truly been made new through your faith in Jesus. When our heart is right—trusting Christ, increasing in our love for God and for others and hungering for righteousness, there is no place for condemnation and guilt to rule us. And this is made possible because we first received the free gift of righteousness through faith in Jesus (see Romans 5:17). We have been made righteous at the core through faith in the finished work of Christ. Hebrews 10:14 (NKJV) says this, “For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.”
Saving faith in Jesus Christ our Savior is what makes us righteous. Not only what we do is righteous, but weare righteous. Faith is a matter of the heart. Faith is in the heart and originates with our heart. Romans 10:9-10 (NKJV) says it this way, “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”It is a righteousness which is of faith. Our new nature within yearns for righteous living, righteous actions, righteous reactions, and righteous desires. We have been made the righteousness of God in Christ (see 2 Cor. 5:21). Let us allow ourselves to believe that and let us see the difference between what we once considered righteous while under law and what is really righteous now under grace. The former will appear superficial, shallow and dull, the second rich, full and fruitful. To believe that we are righteous through faith in Christ is to obey the Gospel. Not to believe that is to disobey the Gospel; “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?” (Galatians 3:1 NKJV) You need to read the book of Galatians to see that they had gone back to trying to reach perfection through dependence upon the flesh instead of through dependence upon the Holy Spirit by faith. (Also see Galatians 3:3).
God is not interested in what we do for Him out of guilt, He wants our heart! Do we want Him or not? Let us let our graced will rise up and actively choose Him—“as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord!” (see Joshua 24:15). Do we trust Him or not? Do we love Him or not? Do we want to live for Him or not? Do we want to serve Him or not? He isn’t interested in anything we have to offer Him if it is not coming from a heart of faith in Him and love for Him. He isn’t interested in us trying to perform in order to try to earn His approval, what He is interested in is our very heart. What do we really desire? What truly motivates us? Do we want Him? Everything flowing from such ‘want to’ will be a sweet fragrance to Him. God loves a cheerful giver (see 2 Cor. 9:7) and something tells me that this is not only true about money offering, but about everything that we offer to God in faith.
Finally, let us be reinvigorated by the fact that even if we may struggle to be willing at times, we can ask God to help our will and to convince us as to cause us to become willing; “For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for Hisgood pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13 NKJV)
What God wants is our heart; He wants our love. Everything else will naturally flow from there.
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.”―Ezekiel 36:26-27 NKJV
“But My servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit in him and has followed Me fully, I will bring into the land where he went, and his descendants shall inherit it.”―Numbers 14:24 NKJV
Be encouraged dear one, there is hope! There isa way out.
