So this is my struggle this morning. I am a head person. A thinker. A knowledge person. When a problem comes up, I want to get all the information possible so I can go about solving the problem logically and systematically. I’m not sure how I came to be this way, because I have also always been a dreamer with my head in the clouds, so this is all really weird for me. But my struggle as a thinker, is to feel. I often push my heart out of the way because knowledge is black and white, concrete, solid. I can deal with the sure, the predictable. I don’t think that knowledge is bad, but the exclusivity that I hold it to is. God is seeking those who would worship him in spirit and in truth, and I worship him in truth, but have a hard time worshiping him in spirit. I don’t know, maybe it is because I know what my life looks like when following my heart. I am a very selfish person when I follow my heart. Or maybe I wasn’t really following my heart, but my idolatrous desires. Or was it my unregenerate heart that has always led me to such selfishness? All I know is that in following my heart in the past, I have heart a lot of people, not least of which is my wife, and always God in the most.
So because of that history, I don’t trust my heart and have failed to follow it. But I have also failed to live with it. I was reading in Jeremiah this morning and something I have read before stood out to me. Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it.” This is what I am afraid of. I know that there needs to be a balance of the knowledge of the truth, and the following the spirit, and I know that despite my resistance, the spirit is doing his regenerative work in me. But I still struggle when reading the Bible, writing, and living, to let my heart feel what I am learning. To let the knowledge sink in. To fear, to love, to hurt, to be responsive.
The very next verse says, “I the LORD search the heart and test the mind”. So my mind and understanding reads this and says that the answer is to let the Lord search my heart and mind, and let the Holy Spirit interpret to me what is good and what is evil, but I have no idea how to do that. I understand that I pray for exactly that, and that He is faithful to do it, because that’s what he wants anyways, but it is still a struggle to me because I don’t feel the process, and it’s not something my mind can analyze. I don’t often enough take the time to look back and see how he has done so much of it already.
Oct 13th by josh