What's in your heart?

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No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. (I Corinthians 2:11-12)

A person's heart is a treasury of dreams and imagination, but it is also a harborer of doubts, fears, and failures, isn't it? We might hold onto certain dreams, hoping for their fulfillment, all the while investing a great deal of our heart's energy and attention into seeing those dreams through to fruition. We also hold onto certain failures, hurts, and habits that our heart seems to wrap much emotional energy around that could be spent pursuing better things. God knows what is contained within our hearts - the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly. Isn't it a wise choice to ask him to sort out what is in our heart, revealing what should be kept and nurtured, while letting go of what only results in emotional upheaval and mistrust?

We have received God's Spirit, so we need to allow his Spirit to reveal to us where it is we are holding onto things that we need to clearly be rid of. God's heartbeat can be felt within our spirit, but the more we allow this world's spirit of fear, doubt, and destructive thoughts inhabit the precious space within our heart, we won't hear his heartbeat as well as we should. Our emotions are a mess because we allow things from this world to enter in, take root, and produce fruit that is bitter and of no use to us. The spirit of this world isn't going to bring all kinds of 'warm fuzzies' into our mind, emotions, or spirit. In fact, it will work overtime to do just the opposite!

We might not even know our own thoughts very well, since they are so up and down all the time. When we are ruled by our emotions, we find the ride is quite bumpy. We don't have stability, finding ourselves making wise choices at times, then listening to some fear or doubt planted by this world's spirit within our hearts, and losing all perspective of God's grace, goodness, and protection. We need to 'shut out' this world's spirit. How? We connect with God, maintain that connection, finding our source of life in nothing other than his presence. The thing we connect with the most makes all the difference in what our heart is filled with, my friends. Just sayin!

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