1 John 4:7-12 Dear friends, let us love one another for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love, does not know God because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us, He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God so loved us, we ought to also love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God’s love is made complete in us.
I would like to tell you how we can love God with our hearts and not just our heads. Romans 12:1 says to present your bodies to God which is your spiritual worship. I want to go through some points to help us understand why it is important to love God not just with our heads but with our hearts.
The Lord said it is the heart, as this is the center of our being. What comes out of a man’s heart expresses what a man is really like. That’s why we need to love God with our heart and not just having an intellectual knowledge of God.
The heart has more of a capacity to understand God than the head does because with the head we try to rationalize and understand God, but with the heart we love God. It is important that we understand that if we try to understand God with just intellectual knowledge, we will be very limited and we won’t be able to cope with Him. Our hearts allow us to cope with Him but our heads alone don’t allow us to cope with Him. Our heads attempt to understand Him but our hearts allow us to cope and have a relationship with Him.
Friendship is one of the central themes of our relationship to God and to one another. God is a heart trip. We have to do heart work to understand God and not just hard work. Our heads lead us to hard work, but our hearts lead us to heart work. It’s important that we grasp this because it is by heart work that we begin to understand God’s heart and begin to understand one another.
What are some of the principles that help us to begin to grow in heart work?
1. Our hearts are more important to God than our heads. That means God has established the heart as the center of our being. We use our heads but we live with our hearts. It is important that we understand the difference. If we just use our heads, then our relationships are going to be based on circumstances and information; then they are going to be shallow. When we relate to God, we can’t relate to Him just on the basis of our knowledge as He cannot be understood just with knowledge. God must be loved and not just known.
To have a heart work relationship with God, we need to be in love with Him, not just understand Him. We need to be able to call God a friend and not just be a worker for Him. When we are just a worker for God, we can allow our relationship with Him to be just a head trip. When we are a friend of God, our passionate relationship with Him is much more important than the task that we do for Him. Head work leads us to perform tasks for Him, which is a service centered relationship; but our hearts bring us to friendships. The person is more important than their performance to God. This should be the same for us. we need to love people for who they are, not what they can do for us.
2. We need to learn to relate to God in trust and give up our need to be in control of the circumstances. If we relate to God with our heads, we need to be in control; but if we relate to God with our hearts, we can learn to trust Him. One of the biggest struggles of our Christian walk will be to develop a heart trust instead of a head trust. We like to be in control of God because we think we can understand what He is doing. Man seeks to control God so that we can manipulate and control other persons responses. Being in control leads to a thirst for power and increasing self-centeredness. Having God in control leads us to humility and selflessness. This selflessness is a necessary ingredient to having intimacy with God. Relationship is more important than control. What God asks us to do comes out of His love for us and not a need to boss someone around.
3. We need to ask God for His love for God and others. Too many of us ask God for a task. God if you really love me, give me ministry. This makes God cry because God wants us to ask Him for His love, not just for ministry or something to do for Him. God wants to give us love for Him which is the most important heart work. If we just ask God for a task, then we will never really grow in love for Him.
When we ask God for love, then we ask Him for a relationship, which is bigger than any task. Do we marry our spouse so they can pay the bills, mow the lawn and fix the house? When we ask God for love, we ask for heart work. This means the ability to give our affection and feelings to someone else. If I give them a task, I am not relating on an intimate level. When I give them my affection, love and care, then I begin to establish intimacy. God is about relationship; when we ask for love, we grow in intimacy and not just the ability to finish a task.
4. We need to think about love and delight in it to do heart work. How many times have we thought about love today, or are we too busy thinking about our to do list? If we thought about love, then we are a blessed people. If we want to grow in a heart relationship of love with God and others, we need to think about how God loves, and experiment with the ways we love to build a heart work relationship. A heart work relationship can be a happy, glad and delightful relationship. We find delight and pleasure in giving love and receiving love. This is why it’s a delight to be in love This is how it should be with the Lord. The Bible says in Proverbs 3:5-6 to take delight in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding.
So how do we delight in love? We express our appreciation and thanks by talking to them on a personal level. If we delight in something, you are more likely to talk about it. We also get excited about the ones we love and treat them as a treasure. All of us should have a treasure chest of love filled with memories for everyone. We fill it with the acts of love and kindness that others have done for us. This helps me to stay connected and grow in love for that person; so, when I am away from them or having a hard time with them, I can go back to my treasure chest and remember what they did for me. It is a rich inheritance that God wants to give us. It is a very powerful device to grow in heart work. We can’t grow in heart work without remembering love, delighting in love and having a treasure chest of love.
5. We need to love God for who He is and not just what He does for us. All of us are going to come to a point where we say, I love you God for who You are and not for what you do for me.” We as people love to be loved that way. God also delights in being loved that way. The purest form of love is to love God for being God and not for what He does for me. That’s heart work to know God so well that I can take delight in the fact that God loves me even when things aren’t going my way.
6. We use God at the task level but it is an entirely different level to need God. To need Him is the real key to having an intimate relationship. When we don’t need God, we are going to use Him. To have a heart relationship with God, we must want God’s kingdom more than our kingdom. God’s kingdom is built from heart work and our task-oriented kingdom is built through hard work. I am not saying that we don’t have to work hard for the Lord sometimes, but that is not the basis of it. The basis for it is heart work, and not hard work.
What kingdom did we spend time in today? What kingdom did we try to build in the people that we met, our kingdom or God’s kingdom? These are the kinds of things that will cause heart work to grow and not just hard work. Did I invest in God’s kingdom today? Did I grow in heart work by loving my brothers and sisters and bringing them closer to Jesus? Because of my sacrifice and my love, did I bring them closer to the Kingdom of God?
7. Sometimes we give Him our hearts, but we find receiving His heart even more painful. So, we shy away from it because there is too much pain or responsibility. We need to give God our heart because it is the center of His heart work.
8. We must want more and more of God and less and less of the world. The world says if you work hard, you can succeed and have power, money and authority, But God says, if you want Me, you will have all you need. We must want more of Him and less of the world. We can’t want the world and invest in heart work. Hard work in the world leads to pain, exhaustion and difficulty, but heart work leads to relationship with Jesus Christ and growing in your ability to love the Lord. Choose Jesus to do heart work.
9. We can know about Him and not know Him. If someone asked you “do you know God or about Him, what would you say?” We need to be examining this every so often. Karl Marx and Satan know about God. Charles Manson knows about God and quoted scripture. It is not good enough to know about God. I can talk about bananas and tell everyone what they are like or I can eat a banana. Then I can enjoy the banana and delight in eating it. If I never eat one, I only know about a banana. Without a personal relationship with God we can only know about Him. Knowledge about God is inferior to friendship with God.
10. God wants our affection and not just our affirmation. What God really wants is the affection of our hearts. I can affirm that I am a U.S. citizen, but I don’t have to be affectionate about America. I can affirm I have to work, but I may not like my work at all. Does God have our affection or just our affirmation?
11. How we love others around us is how we love God. This is our biggest challenge as we ask what is my heart work towards my brothers and sisters. Am I open to feeling and relating in the ways that God wants me to? How I love the people around me is how I love God. God is patient and merciful to us by grace, but He wants us to know that this is His measuring stick. If we say we love God and we don’t love our brothers and sisters, then we really don’t love God. Head work and hard work can be only lip service. Heart work is real love and affection.
12. We must give our fears to God so He can give us love and peace. We can’t do heart work for God with fear because it will leave us bound up; so, give any fear to God so that we can get involved in heart work. When we pray, God will take away our fears. Fear is one of the biggest obstacles to heart work. Fear kills heart work and you can’t overcome fear by hard work. Heart work is what destroys fear because it comes from God. I John 4 says that perfect love casts out fear. That perfect love is the heart work of God in our life.
13. We must allow ourselves to be broken to know and receive God’s love. A lot of people want to know God and do His will but they want to do it without any pain. We cannot be a heart working person without being a broken person. We cannot experience God’s broken heart without experiencing a broken heart ourselves. It is the broken heart that allows the love of God to seep into our hearts. Heart working people are broken vessels. A broken vessel is one that is fashioned by God and is made for His use.
14. God can turn our pain into joy. To love someone, we must be willing to experience what they feel. When we love God and others, it will bring us pain and joy. We cannot love someone without it sometimes producing pain in their lives. This comes also in our relationship with God. God allows us to experience pain but He uses it to bring us His joy. We are afraid of pain. People who constantly avoid pain will not have the ability to do heart work for the Lord. Just head work and hard work will not teach us about the kingdom of God.
15. Being loved means having a personal sense of safety and protection. We must allow ourselves to need and be needed to be a heart worker. Being needed is a deep human desire that is often missing in many of our relationships. Part of being needed is the desire to both give and receive protection to those whom we care about. Love cannot continue to flourish without some sense of safety and protection. The world boasts about teaching us to be able to protect ourselves. The people of the Lord trust in Him and also experience that protection and safety by sharing His love with each other.
16. Being loved means that God has the freedom to say yes, no or wait; and we also need to learn to say yes and no to other people. It is a sign of maturity that we can say yes or no based on our judgment of the situation.
17. Being loving is a gift that comes from the art of learning to admit that we are helpless in knowing how to love people. We need God’s help to love others. He is the only one who knows what is really going on in the lives of the people around us. God can give us the ability to love others as they need to be loved not necessarily as we want to love them. Our own perceptions can be very limited but God knows the condition of every person’s heart.
18. Love is accepting God’s forgiveness for yourself and giving forgiveness for others when they need it. We should be able to forgive ourselves and other people because God forgives us and because God commands it. Forgiveness is a gift from God and cannot be earned from Him; this is for our own good and for the good of others.
19. We must ask again and again for His heart for others. Persistently asking for His heart makes us heart workers. We will receive what we pursue with great determination. Heart workers see that having God’s heart is the most important thing that they can do in their life. As a result, they ask for it fearlessly. God can give us no greater intimate gift than His heart.
20. We must give up our right to criticize others and let the Holy Spirit convict them. Heart workers are lovers and not judges or lawyers in the spirit. We should be loving people and not full of conviction and judgment. Hard workers and head workers criticize because they think that they have a better idea. We need to let Jesus and His love change others, and not our criticism of others, so bring them to Jesus in prayer and let Him do the job.
21. A heart worker is someone who is always looking for God. This means that anyone could be our teacher if God should so decide to use them in our lives. A heart worker is both eager and grateful to hear the word of the Lord. They are hungry to feel the touch of God or hear His Word whenever they can, and will be touched by many people before they reach heaven. When we are humble towards others, we will also humble ourselves before God.
The Eagles Cry 