How is your heart? Are you making a place in your heart for God’s message? Do we want to make a place in our hearts for God?
Every day we walk through life, surviving or intentionally making it from meal to meal until our next sleep time. If our life is chaos, we pray with each reminder of our situation. When things seem smooth, we barely remember our devotional. We hurry through the motions and rail against our lack of time.
This doesn’t work forever. Soon enough we get burned out, exhausted, or tempted to fall back into our old ways. This is because we are not making a place in our heart for God’s message. We move through our days on auto-pilot, only changing things when we have to.
This year should be different.
This year we will make a place in our hearts for God’s message.
In Acts 2:40 through 3:1, Luke describes how the early Christians lived. The death of Jesus Christ was new to them. The apostles who walked with Jesus were still alive and lived among them. They had experiences and friends with the same experiences in their lifetimes.
In biblical times, they didn’t live with the variety of temptations, distractions, and cares we do. They lived with persecution, occupation, and less freedom. Our issues with care and comfort should lead toward a life with God. But it takes self-sacrifice and self-control to ignore the world and walk toward God.
How did the early church make a place for God’s message in their hearts?
They:
- Committed to learning what the apostles teach – read the letters over and over.
- Gathered together for fellowship.
- Shared meals and communion together with glad, generous hearts.
- Prayed in secret and with others.
- Shared material possessions with others as God leads.
- Worshiped God in homes together in groups.
- Praised God in daily walk.
- Valued people more than possessions.
A sense of awe for what God is doing
If we do the same on a regular basis, we will experience a sense of awe for what God does in our lives and around us. God will create togetherness among us, removing divisions and petty disagreements. The hungry and homeless will be fed and housed. Even the people of the city will have goodwill toward us.
God will add to our number and we will experience a freedom beyond our comprehension. We will live as a large, passionate, healthy family who naturally pray and share life together.
Let’s start here:
What is your customary time of prayer? Let’s make a place in our hearts for God’s message!
For more information on prayer, Bible study, and starting new, check out these books:
