Some time ago, I was asking God to help me encounter another level of intimacy with Him. My mind kept coming back to purity of heart and the verse in Luke 6 when Jesus teaches about trees producing after their kind. This teaching ends with Jesus proclaiming, “out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (NKJV) As I continued meditating on this word, I was shown a slightly disturbing image that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
I saw a heart, slightly dirty, beating out of rhythm, with pitch black sludge boiling out of it, popping and spewing hot tar on the organs around it. As I continued to observe the vision, periodically little white whisps of steaming light would escape from of one of the inky bubbles. I began to wonder, from a spiritual aspect, is this what my heart looks like?
As I continued wrestling with this vision, the Lord began to reveal to me, yes, this is what my heart looks like. As it says in the Word, my heart is desperately sick and deceitful above all else, it is flooded with looming darkness, wickedness and pain, but the little whisps of light reminded me, there is hope for this heart. The darkness is not stagnate and festering anymore because the light is starting to purify it from the inside out. The darkness was churning because the Spirit of the Living God who loves me and wants to see me live an abundant life, free of bondage to sin, alive, and thriving in truth, is actively working this wretched sickness out of my life.
So how does this work? Luke 6:45 in the NIV says, “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” Let’s say you live out in the country so you have a well in your back yard where you get your water. If the well has delicious spring water in it, when you turn your faucet on, what are you gonna get? That’s right, delicious spring water. Let’s say you’re not paying attention one day and a squirrel jumps in there and drowns, then your neighbor who is mad because you left your Christmas lights up too long threw all of his trash, a babies diaper, then dumped his last oil change in there. What is going to come out of the faucet when you turn it on? Exactly what you put in the well, dirty, nasty trash water. This verse is saying the same thing about your heart. Whatever you fill it with, will eventually come out.
So how do we fix this? How do I successfully purify my heart from all this nonsense? On this earth, there is no such thing as a natural vacuum. There has to be something taking up that space, so you can’t simply clean out the old and not bring in the new. If you pray for God to cleanse your heart, you have to fill it with His Word. Replace the Emenim lyrics with Psalms and Proverbs. You have to re-teach your heart. But how does this happen?
Philippians 4:8 begs “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.”(NLT)
Another version says “meditate” on these things. To meditate simply means to “think deeply or carefully” about something. I don’t know about you but, when I hear a song with a catchy beat and genius lyrics (mother approved or not), it becomes lodged in my mind and the lyrics play in my head over and over, especially when I am trying to go to sleep. This is also meditation.
When you sleep, most of the time, your subconscious is processing what happened during the day and “meditating” on what you were thinking about before you went to bed. That’s why the last 5, 15 minutes or even hour you spend before bed is so important. I know personally, if I am thinking about something before I go to bed, I will probably be thinking about that when I wake up also. Therefore, I have found that having a quiet time right before bed positions me to sleep well and wake up with a song of the Lord on my heart.
Now I want to switch gears and talk about darkness. Darkness isn’t a thing in and of itself, it is simply the lack of light. A small candle can produce enough light to see in a room. Or when you walk into a dark room and flip the light switch, the darkness is immediately overcome by the light. It disappears into thin air because it was overpowered simply by the introduction of light.
Now let’s talk about shadows. Shadows only appear if something is there to block the light. There is still light present however, its effect is not seen with as much intensity because something is coming in between the light and it’s destination. Keep in mind, the light is just as bright around the shadow as it is in the rest of the room. Also, have you ever seen overlapping shadows that cause different layers of darkness? Do you see where I’m going here? If something is coming in between us and God, if something is interrupting that intimacy, we still have light, we still have a relationship with God, but we aren’t shining to our full potential because there is something in the way, breaking the fellowship with the Light. However, knowing there is a shadow is a good start because it means we have identified that God is directly radiating light onto what is blocking our intimacy with Him.
A person can’t simply expect for darkness to be defeated unless they allow the Lord to introduce light into the situation. The greatest, seemingly impossible desire I’ve ever had is to live a pure life, to be sanctified before my God. To never have feel the shame and guilt after an embarrassing fall when I knew better. Even though this is my true desire, I stumble and fall every day. Just like water takes time to boil, or a delicious soup or sauce takes time to reduce. This sanctification process is just that, a process. It will take time but, I wholeheartedly believe it will be worth it.
So, what stumbling blocks are in your life that are causing a shadow and stifling your intimacy with God? If you can’t think of any, here is a step by step way to find them.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.” Psalm 139:23-24 (NLT)
Love y’all
