The heart is the blood pumping, life giving source of our body. The heart is what others steal from us when we fall in love. But even more importantly, our heart is the spirit-man in who we really are. We know we need to believe, but how do we believe with the heart.
First we have to understand who we are…how we are made. In my last devotional blog post Believing With the Heart we looked at the fact that we are triune (3 part) beings. Hmmm, created kind of like our heavenly Father. We are a spirit (the hidden man of the heart), we have a soul (our mind), and we live in a body (our earth suit).
You Must Be Born Again
Okay, so we are a spirit and we have a mind and a body. God created us this way. So why must we be born again? Know that this is not a random question. This has everything to do with how to believe with the heart.
You must be born again because you are cut off from God. You are spiritually dead.
Isaiah 59:2 NIV
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
The Old is Gone!
What “old” has gone? Alienation, condemnation, sin consciousness, and spiritual death. Separation from God.
The New Has Come
New? Okay, I am going to go a little old style to explain. When you are born again you now have a new FM receiver. You have to have this to pick God up. FM is in the very room in which I am writing this blog. It’s also in the very room in which you are reading this. But if you don’t have an FM receiver, you can’t pick it up. It’s there, you just can’t tune in to it.
That’s the same with us. That FM receiver represents our heart. When we are born again, we have a new heart. Now we can begin to pick up on God and produce faith out of our heart, our new FM receiver.
Understand that the body and the soul (mind) has not changed. They are still capable of doing the same old things, anything, unless you do something about it.
Faith is a Product of the Heart, Not the Head
If faith was a product of the head, then you could have faith without being born again. But you cannot have the God-kind of faith without being born again. Sin corrupts our heart. It cuts us off from God. GOD DOES NOT WANT US TO BE CUT OFF!
God is Spirit
To Know What Man is Like We Have To Know What God is Like. The word Word in John 1:1 is the word Logos in Greek which refers to Jesus Christ. So if anyone ought to know who God is or ain’t (that’s good English), it ought to be Jesus.
In John 4:21-24 the scripture says God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
So we see that God is spirit.
What is man?
Well in Genesis it states that we are created in God’s image. Not in the flesh, because God is spirit. And certainly not our brains which is our mind or soul. So if man is created in the image of God and God is spirit, it must be our spirit-man that is created in His image.
Ready To Follow Me Here? So Get This:
God is FM (Spirit). Man is FM (spirit), but also has an AM (soul/mind) and SiriusXM (body). Well, you can’t contact FM (God) with XM or AM.
So AM is man’s mind/soul, XM is man’s body, and FM is man’s spirit.
God is spirit (FM), so to reach Him you have to use your FM because God is FM. You can’t reach God with your AM or XM.
Most people try to reach God with their AM, their soul, their mind.
But again, AM is soulish, the intellect and the mind. XM is the body, and it only picks up the three dimensional world of our senses.
Contacting God
To contact God, it must be with FM (the spirit) or with what we call the heart (the inner-man or hidden man of the heart).
Faith is a product of the heart, not of the head. When you operate in Faith, you have to leave the realm of the head, the intellect.
You are a heart or a spirit. Our body and our soul revolves around the spirit. With the mind, things don’t always make sense. With the body, things don’t always feel, smell, look or sound right. But our spirit knows.
So to believe with the heart, our spirit (the real us) must be born again. If you are not born-again, you can’t believe with the heart because your heart has been corrupted. It has not been renewed.
If you understand God and are not born again, it’s because your mind can understand God in some very limited ways.
But it doesn’t take faith to understand something according to our understanding. Beyond our understanding, it takes faith. It takes a person with a new spirit that can take God’s word as truth without understanding it, without feeling it, without tasting, smelling it, or without having to figure it out.
Challenge of the Week
Do NOT limit your spirit man, the real you, by trying to use your mind to figure it all out in order to believe it. And don’t limit your spirit by tying it to your body or your senses. Put God’s word into your heart, then accept it as truth and it will transform your life. So be it!
