Preparing Your Mind and Heart to Receive

 

Romans 10:17 tells us that faith comes by hearing and perceiving the Word of God. To get a visual of this, imagine the Word of God being taught over a loudspeaker. Then imagine faith as a person with unlimited potential. It doesn’t matter about the location or how the Word of God is coming through, faith will get up from wherever he or she is sitting and come where the Word of God is being broadcasted. Faith knows that the Words of its Creator will increase it, and all God’s creations love expansion and increase. Faith is a substance that God created, and faith is designed to be mixed with His truth, because its potential is released when we perceive God’s truth. This allows us to know under no uncertain terms that our minds and hearts determine the momentum of faith’s potential, because the mind and heart is the engine of our beliefs.

Salvation is a gift from God, and we receive it through believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. We receive salvation by believing in what God has accomplished for us through His only begotten Son. Romans 10:10(NIV) tells us, “For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.” If we don’t believe, we can’t be saved. But if we do believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ, we will confess it and be saved! The heart and mind that God is referencing in Romans 10:10 are not the same as the biological organs in our physical bodies; they are not physical but spiritual. The heart and mind are parts of the soul, and Romans 10:10 lets us in on how incredibly important it is to believe the truth with our minds and deep within our hearts.

God instructs us in Proverbs 4:23(NLT), “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” Our hearts are containers of invisible substances, and these substances transfer the invisible into the visible dimension based on what we mix them with. God has given us free-will, and we decide what we’re going to harbor in our hearts. In Hebrews 4:2(NKJV), Heavenly Father tells us about those who refused to trust His Word. This verse states, “For indeed the gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it.” These individuals heard the Word, but they didn’t grab hold of it with the desire to make it a part of them. They wouldn’t allow it to take root.

How do we allow the Word of God to take root in our hearts? To get to the bottom of the answer to this question, you and I have to take a closer look under the hood of the gift of free-will. Most people don’t think about this gift much, but when it comes to the reality of our masterful design, we have to go there. Genesis 1:27(NLT) tells us, “So God created human beings in his own image.” What is God’s image? God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is triune in nature, which means one functioning as three. He has made us three-part beings as well. 1Thessalonians 5:23(NLT) reveals this. It says, “Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.” The Godhead is three-parts, and this is how He created us. We are human-spirit, human-soul, and human-body, and He has commanded us to keep all three holy and blameless until Christ returns.

Heavenly Father has not kept the truth of His nature and being a secret but tells us all we need to know in His Word. He is sovereign. He has all and absolute power and authority. He is all-knowing, everywhere present, and He has no equal. He can do what no other can do. He says of Himself in Revelation 1:8(NLT), “I am the Alpha and the Omega—the beginning and the end. I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come—the Almighty One.”  

God has a Will, and He created us to have one too. God’s Will is what He has decreed and ordained to happen, and His Will is absolute. He has not kept us, His children, in the dark about His Will. He has revealed His Will through His Son, Jesus Christ, and therefore we can be 100% assured that His Will is His Word. John 1:4(NLT) declares, “So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.” Jesus Christ is the living Word of God. Christ is God’s Will revealed. So, the Will of God is the Word of God. Anything outside of God’s Word is not His Will.

This truth shows us how unfathomably consequential a will is. The will is the core reality that determines who we are. It determines what we will do, what we want to happen, how we will love and if we will love. The will is the control center of our choices, and those choices define us as either darkness or light.

God can do anything. 1John 4:16 tells us that God is love, and although He can do anything, God confines Himself to only do what He created love to do. Since we are made in His image, we must confine and constrain ourselves in the very same way. God doesn’t do anything outside His love. This is the truth! He created us from His love to be His children. 1Thessalonians 5:5(NLT) says, “For you are all children of the light and of the day; we don't belong to darkness and night.” As children of the light, God has given us this earth experience to line up our will with His Will. He will not force us to do this, because that isn’t the way He designed love to work. Love doesn’t force, push, or shove. Love guides us, and this is what our Heavenly Father does. He guides us through His Holy Spirit to choose to live by His love. By this, you and I must realize that love is a choice. It is the commitment we make through our free-will agency to live by God’s love and to love others.

Our will determines if we will allow God’s Word to be rooted in our hearts, and our will determines the degree to which it will be. Our faith is the expression of how much God’s love is rooted in our hearts. Remember, our lives will follow what we believe. If our faith is small, in most cases, this means that we are mildly interested in the things of God and will only allow ourselves to know a little bit about Jesus. We can only put on as much of Jesus Christ as we know, so it stands to reason that if we know a little, a little is all we can put on. This is a choice. We choose how much of the example of Christ we are going to live.

A person cannot rise above that which they don’t know. When we know more, we do better. So, the more we know God’s Word, the more we know His Will. The more we know His Will, the more we increase our faith in His Word, and the higher we will go. Jesus Christ illustrates this in his parable about the farmer that scattered seeds. In Luke 8:11, he tells us that the seed is God’s Word. In Luke 8:12-15(NLT), he teaches us, “12 The seeds that fell on the footpath represent those who hear the message, only to have the devil come and take it away from their hearts and prevent them from believing and being saved. 13 The seeds on the rocky soil represent those who hear the message and receive it with joy. But since they don’t have deep roots, they believe for a while, then they fall away when they face temptation. 14 The seeds that fell among the thorns represent those who hear the message, but all too quickly the message is crowded out by the cares and riches and pleasures of this life. And so they never grow into maturity. 15 And the seeds that fell on the good soil represent honest, good-hearted people who hear God’s word, cling to it, and patiently produce a huge harvest.”

Before we knew more about God’s Word, many of us believed that faith was confined to receiving our prayer requests. We thought that the reason we didn’t receive what we prayed for was because we didn’t have enough faith. Our faith was never the problem, our believing was. God’s Word must be believed in our hearts, and when it is, we will line up our wills with His Will. We’ll begin to ask the Lord about our purpose, and we’ll be attentive to His directions and instructions. We will change the way we think and begin to think like Christ. Romans 12:2 tells us that when we do these things, we will prove God’s good and perfect Will. We’ll prove it because the evidence of our commitment to Him through Jesus Christ will be apparent in what we do, how we feel, what we confess, and how we think.

Most of us believe we’re just fine in this department, but the proof is in the pudding. Sometimes, we have a prayer request that we’ve been praying about a long time, and we’ve not witnessed any movement towards its manifestation. Many of us opt for frustration or indifference rather than seeking God and asking Him to aid our unbelief. It could be that our minds and hearts are not prepared to receive because we’re still allowing our own wills to run the show and haven’t fully surrendered to the Will of God. Many of us are doing what we want to do, and then expecting God to bless it. He’s the One with the plan. He tells us what to do, and when we wait on Him, the faith we need along with everything else is included.

For many of us, this is a totally new way of operating, but it is what spiritual maturity in Christ requires. Jesus Christ said in John 5:19(NLT), “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself. He does only what he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, the Son also does.” Our Lord and Savior spent much time in prayer, and we should as well. God showed him what to do, and this is our pattern, for Heavenly Father will show us what to do as well. If we try and take the reins, the outcome will be less than satisfactory. But when we prepare our minds and hearts with God’s Word, we can be confident in His Will, and the blessings He has ordained for our lives will chase us down.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. 

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. 

“Preparing Your Mind and Heart to Receive”, by written for Christian Encouragement and Inspiration© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.