A Sickness Desiring Heart

I was hearing the whispers, but they were just beyond reach. Curiosity had me though, in my early morning state curiosity seemed to be the necessary food to get the mind rolling for the day. Even though it was still dark, I had grown very skilled in the art of "light-less room navigation". It is uncanny how with just a few minutes of disciplined mental notes, an unfamiliar location can become familiar for an unlit walk.

{“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"Jeremiah 17:9 The most slippery and insidious thing about the unregenerate heart of man is that is irreparably sick and it doesn't want to get better. It actually thrives on being sick: who has the will power to begin to know it? Staying too close to this heart creates a codependency of a continual desire for discrediting our God Story... it buys bad news, it invests in tragedy, and is incurably ill as it hardens its way through life keeping us at an unhealthy distance from God. Remedy? God does not offer a healing, because He offers a replacement – a new heart … but still a heart of flesh - Ezekiel 36:26,27.}

I had only taken a few steps to find what had been just beyond my ability to hear with any accuracy (actually my toes found it). A gooey and gross meeting of my toes with this object in the dark had me leaping in a backwards direction by reflex. “Man! What in the world?” Immediately my mind began to flash – dead animals, road kill, chunky vomit ...I was totally “creep-ed” out! But by now I could hear a little more clearly ...the little voice that sounded like mine, but like it was coming through a cell phone speaker .. “Help me, I am nothing but a failure, I am trash, nobody cares about me, nobody loves me, God cares about everyone else but me, I am ashamed to live openly for Jesus”.

When I flipped on the light I found a most despicable gruesome image of me, but stripped of any beauty and goodness. There was a murky colored orb with tubes of syrup-like liquid flowing to and from this image of me. This image of me was clinging onto this orb ever so tightly. I stared and wondered , “why was this orb held so tightly?”

Inside the orb were horrifying images: images of sordid evil, murders, adulteries, fornication, stench, pornography, thefts, false witness and slander, all kinds of blasphemies. And this image of me rubbed the orb and kept mumbling, “make me sick, oh, please make me sick”. I was starting to understand why no healing was offered and how a new heart was the only remedy.

But wait a minute! I have a new heart! Not only a New heart, but all things new … New Spirit, New Life, New Mind, New Hope ...(we could go on); the Gift of God is Eternal Life through Jesus Christ Our LORD. Why am I still influenced by this “sick” heart of stone?

If we “Walk in the Light, as He is in the light” we have continual fellowship and His Blood's constant cleansing (I John 1:7). I found myself preparing for "light-less room navigation", when I should have been more focused on "Light-filled Kingdom Navigation". “Thy Word is a Lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” Psalm 119:105 --- Is just one of the 176 verses in Psalm 119 that teach the dynamics of the necessity of the Word of God to give us victory in the moments when the “sickness desiring heart” wants to speak discouragement, despair, and distance from our God into our lives. Our New Heart needs daily connection to God's Word for victory over this malady.

The battle against this heart begins with a simple prayer of admission to the fact that we are distant and ashamed to allow the God Story to shine from our life. (At the end of 175 verses expounding on the life positioned close to God's Word – the Psalmist like us admitted: ) “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; I do not forget Thy commandments.” Psalm 119:176 Are we hearing  and believing the counsel of “Failure”? Listen again to the One who seeks to deliver you out of darkness into His glorious life of light.

HLFA,

Jeff