You Gotta Have Heart!

Romans 10:10 Paul writes, “For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.”

The other day, my son wanted to see what a real human heart looked like. So we went online and looked it up. He was pretty grossed out. The human heart isn’t very attractive. God often prefers function over form. Jesus said that it was out of the heart that all kinds of evil come. He also said that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. The heart of the matter is your heart.

Paul is writing about righteousness. There were still some people who thought that they needed to depend on their own works, their own merit, their own goodness to be justified, saved or forgiven. I’m so glad that we aren’t like that anymore. (please read that with a whole lot of tongue-in-cheek) Paul said that belief is in the heart, not the head and not the strength. Well, the heart is something that we have very little, if any, control over. It functions on its own most of the time. There are those whose heart needs some help, but mostly it just goes on beating. Paul is not talking about the physical heart, but that which is deep down in the very core of your being.

On our own, left to our own devices, our hearts are dark and dingy places. There’s not much there. There is certainly no belief in Jesus in a heart left in the dark. Paul talks a lot about how the Holy Spirit gets into our hearts and brings light to the dark places. John talks about that too. Paul goes on in Romans 10 to talk about believing coming from hearing and hearing coming from speaking. Someone needs to speak the words so that someone else can hear them so that the heart can believe them.

The one that is active in all of that is the Holy Spirit. He’s the one who creates and sustains faith. The Holy Spirit prompts the mouth to speak and even, according to Jesus, teaches the mouth what to say. Then, through the words spoken, the Holy Spirit guides them into the ears and down into the heart where He once again creates faith. And it’s through that faith that clings to Jesus justification comes.

That’s a lot of work for the heart. How has the Holy Spirit been giving your heart a work out?

Heavenly Father, you prefer function over form. Stir up in our hearts the gifts of faith and belief through your Holy Spirit. Then, open our mouths to speak the words that the Holy Spirit can use to create faith in someone’s heart. In Jesus’ name, Amen.