Episode #130 Drawing Close with Heartfelt Faith – Life With God

Hey friend, when you think about God, what does that spark in your heart? We're talking today about bringing our whole selves to God, and that includes our head, our heart, and our hands. And we're focusing on the beauty of what it means to love God with our whole heart.

Now, if you're new to this series and you haven't yet taken the quiz, I encourage you to do so. You can check out the link that's right here in the show notes. And that quick quiz is going to help you identify the way that you tend to connect with God best—head, heart, or hands. And what we're talking about here is bringing our whole selves to God.

So it's not to only approach him with our heart, but to know where we have already established strengths and then how we can maximize those strengths to connect with God, bringing our whole selves to him.

But unfortunately, I have found that no matter what strengths we have or what things are already really strong in our relationships with God, we can easily find reasons to disqualify ourselves from connecting.

And one of the ways that plays out is denying how we approach God and feeling like we need to approach him in a different way instead.

And what we're talking about here is that you can approach God with your whole self. We are all created to engage with him using our head, our hearts, and our hands. And that we can maximize our current connection to grow our relationship with him using the places where we're strongest.

We don't have to ignore or disqualify them as somehow less applicable to our spiritual life.

And today we're looking at how we can connect with God via our hearts.

You might be strong at connecting with God using your heart if some of these things resonate with you, you love drawing near in times of corporate worship or prayer. You'll talk about your connection as having a sense of him, a sense of peace, a sense of his presence, a sense of direction.

You might have core memories in your walk, in your journey of life with God that are tied to significant experiences that you've had with him. You might even have pivotal memories from your childhood or from when you came to salvation that still resonate as a sensory experience.

You can imagine yourself there. You can feel what it was like in those moments with the Lord.

Maybe when you talk about God, you find yourself moved with passion and enthusiasm. You can find yourself talking louder or getting more animated as the conversation keeps going. You might even find yourself drawn to pastors and preachers who deliver their messages in a similar style with motivation and inspiration and enthusiasm and animated passion behind their words.

You may even find that when you go to God, it's easy for you to bring the tender things on your heart before him, you talk about your passions or your dreams or your goals, you find yourself responding to his heart, connecting with you.

So again, we all connect with God with our head, our heart, and our hands, but if those especially resonated with you, you may naturally tend toward connecting with God best via your heart.

Let's look at some verses that talk about how we can connect with God this way.

Proverbs 4:23 says “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.”

Jeremiah 29:13 says “you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

In 1 Peter 3:3-4, it says, “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.”

Psalm 51:10 says, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

Psalm 37:4 says, “Take delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Our God is a God of love. He loves us fully and completely. He draws us to his own heart. The Yearning that you have in your heart to know God is an echo of the longing of God's heart. He also longs for you to know him. And so, when it comes to the way that you connect with God, sometimes the enemy simply tries to accuse that so he can take it away from you. Maybe he'll accuse you of not having the understanding that other believers might have because they connect with God best via their heads. Maybe he'll accuse you of not having deep roots because you connect in an emotional or feeling or sensing type of way.

It is not only the people who connect best with their heads who can be spiritually mature.

God is growing all of us in maturity in Christ. And we get to come with our whole selves. And that includes coming in the way that you have been uniquely crafted and designed by God to connect with his heart. Grow as a follower of him by connecting with him via your heart, inviting him to search your heart and to cleanse your heart, to give you the loves that you're to have in your heart, to transform your desires, to fuel your faith and to fuel your life in him.

As we go through this series, we're identifying some of the ways that these approaches can be strengths and potentially can be weaknesses to our walks with God. I connect best with my head.

And sometimes I can get overly reliant on that. And so instead of actually approaching God to engage with him, I talk about it like I'm coming God adjacent. I'll engage with content about him, but I don't actually come to connect with him. A similar thing can happen in every personality style.

We can seek out worshipful environments because they feel good and they feel close to God, but still miss the opportunity of genuinely connecting with God and offering worship to him. And so we're going to talk with God more about connecting with him via our hearts because we all get to approach him in this way.

And our question for him today is simple.

God, when it comes to us connecting via my heart, what do You love about that?

I wonder what he wants to show you. Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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