CHRISTIAN AT MIND BUT NOT AT HEART

There are those of us who consider ourselves Christians simply because we agree there is a God, and we believe in our mind that Jesus rose from the dead. And while the mind may like the idea of Christianity and find it interesting, the heart doesn’t always follow in this vein. A person may grasp the message of the Gospel in their mind without receiving God’s gift of salvation in their heart.

This is critical.

FUNDAMENTAL HEART SHIFT

Repenting upon receiving the Gospel message is usually a clear sign that it’s sunk deeper than our mind. This is because repentance isn’t just saying “I’m sorry” to God or feeling upset over the idea of having sinned. It’s much deeper than an apology. Repentance is a lifestyle transition, specifically one of realizing the nuisance of pursuing ourselves and galvanizing the ambition of putting on the new self we receive in faith, over time, in Christ.

This is a choice that each of us as Christ-followers need to make on a daily basis. When we repent, it’s not merely an emotional reaction to God’s invitation to be a Christ-follower, but a fundamental heart shift initiated by embracing the message of Scripture in a very personal way. In other words, it changes us from the inside out rather than just acting as a feel-good moment. Repentance doesn’t stop with learning about God’s unfailing forgiveness, but is merely the beginning of the rebirth process.

REPENTANCE BREEDS HOPE AND FIRE

Even further than that, repentance breathes faith into our spirit that the God of Heaven has a purpose and a plan for our lives that our sins, when all added up from beginning to end, could never stop from being completed in and through us. There’s a deep sense of hope that comes from this kind of faith, and it tends to light a fire in our spirit that ultimately aims our heart posture towards pleasing God; a fire that is delivered first to our soul by the Holy Spirit and consequentially emanated into the presence of those around us in our daily lives as we practice living from the spirit and not the flesh.

That’s a genuine reaction to the Gospel news: repentance, hope, and fire.

WHEN WE HAVEN’T LET GO YET

When our sin feels heavy but the invitation to know Jesus and live differently feels light, that’s when we know something has clicked deeper than just in our mind.

For those of us who have heard of Jesus but the Gospel message doesn’t sound very appealing, the lack of appeal is due to our higher altitude of self-interest. We lack the desire to let go of the flesh and the world, of our motivations and ambitions. When the devil has a hold of us, we find ourselves much more interested in seeing life in an unbiblical manner without giving much of a second thought to what that does to the rest of our lives—both spiritually and corporeally.

THE DEVIL’S MANIPULATION

The devil is prowling around like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). If we’re not paying attention, he’s manipulating us into believing that the world is only what we make of it, that we’re in control, and that indulging our desires is our only purpose.

This is unbiblical. It’s not a pleasing heart posture to God; in fact, it doesn’t even derive from a human-flourishing mindset. Living to indulge our physical desires is birthed from a spiritual altitude where the appeal is our flesh and not our faith.

SEEKING GOD FIRST

When we serve God, we aim to live our lives in a manner and with the intention of pleasing Him and inviting Him further into our lives to help us grow. By living biblically, we desire the Kingdom of Heaven over the ways of the world. But that preference only suits us well when we seek God first.

In fact, human flourishing in itself only makes sense when we seek God ahead of humanity. On our own accord, we don’t have a strong enough philosophical reason to aim the way we live to please God. We end up practicing lifestyles and adhering to beliefs that benefit particular communities, but not the whole world; and if the whole world, then not the intrinsic component of humanity that extends beyond this life. Only a Kingdom-minded individual sees beyond the small picture of earthly life and the way our faith leads not only to the flourishing of humanity here, but to the cultivation of God’s Kingdom yet to come.

STRUCTURAL CHANGES

Learning to seek God first requires time in the Bible and prayer in solitude, revering His presence and His name; in essence, rewiring our spiritual selves to align with the Holy Spirit and to disconnect from the principalities of darkness we’ve blindly garnered influence from. We become accustomed to living for ourselves and desiring only what makes us feel good when we aren’t reading Scripture, or when we aren’t subservient in prayer and actively seeking daily structural changes that help direct our growth towards Kingdom-based values.

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE

To live by the world’s standards is not to live for God. And to live for God, we cannot love the world or the things of the world—things like money, power, sexual immorality, status, etc. To love these things means to desire for them to be a bigger part of our lives than God. And to desire God more than anything else requires patience to unlearn bad habits, enforcing discipline that trains our spiritual selves not to seek opportunities to satisfy the flesh. Sometimes it takes ongoing efforts to unlearn worldly living, but the more we seek God first, the more these old lifestyles won’t even appeal to our new godliness anyway.

CHANGING OUR SPIRITUAL DIET

Christianity is our new self in relationship with God in which faith in Jesus motivates us to navigate life differently, to think and act differently than before. That is where “faith without works is dead” plays its role (James 2:17). When faith is genuine, it produces the fruit of works.

We must stop ingesting the same unhealthy spiritual nutrients we’ve been feeding ourselves for so long. This is how we learn to take care of what God has given us in order to carry out His will and please Him with our time, rather than please our flesh with our sins.

Maybe it doesn’t happen overnight for a lot of us who are more stuck in bad habits, but the journey towards Kingdom-living must begin somewhere, and it must be planted within our quest to become intimate with God the Father.

FREE WILL AND ERRATIC LIVING

To desire not to know God is to desire to be without Him, and He will never force us to know Him or to be with Him. Eternal darkness and separation awaits those who don’t want to live renewed lives, repentant lives; those who prefer to see the world the way the devil wants them to see it, believing in the lies of selfishness, egotism and self-reliance—all in the name of living the way we want.

Some people actually believe we don’t have free will! So many people live in such blind naivety to how their decisions impact their communities, families, and the world at large, and yet they would argue there is no such thing as free will to begin with. The lengths to which people will go to abuse their use of free will is disparaging on its own. To argue people don’t have the choice to live, think, believe, and act independently while behaving so erratically and detrimentally really is its own counterargument! 

WORLDLY IDEOLOGIES AND OBJECTIVE MORALITY

There are so many different reasons people give for not wanting to live a godly life, a life in pursuit of God and His Kingdom, of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord; reasons that aren’t sufficient for choosing to live life believing in society’s ideologies when those very ideologies are built upon anti-biblical standards only designed to make life livable for those who don’t want to believe in God or Jesus, but who can’t escape the implications of having a compromised objective moral stance.

In other words, we want objective morality and to live by a code, but we want to create the code while denying there is a code-maker that provided codes to begin with. We don’t want to acknowledge Him because His codes are, in our opinion, questionable and not preferable to our worldly standards.

AMBIGUOUS STANDARDS

There wouldn’t even be a standard if not for a standard-Giver! The argument implodes on itself before it has the chance to carry any weight, and yet there is no acknowledgment of this because the people adhering to these relativistic standards don’t understand the contradiction of their own argument. They only see what they want to see, which was provided to them by the prowling lion (the devil). They certainly weren’t seeking out the Kingdom of Heaven for those lifestyle choices.

They were searching for how to live their own way in a world promoting that their way is acceptable, despite the fact that objective morality is the only reason to have an argument about what is “acceptable” in the first place, and the only reason we even have objective morality is due to the nature of the theistic biblical God who provided us with a standard higher than our own.

OUR LIVES DEPEND ON THIS CHOICE

Christianity is not just a nice thought, it’s a lifestyle. It needs to be made every day, because every day we wage war with our flesh. We have to keep at it and pursue the Kingdom of God above all else. It’s not as though our lives depends on it, it’s because our lives literally depend on it.

One thing I’ve learned through my years as a Christ-follower is that when I don’t prioritize God and His Kingdom first, my life starts to grow worse rather quickly. This is why we must continually repentant and, in prayer, ask God to know our heart and reveal to us how we can grow even deeper in Him. We cannot grow by believing Christianity is a one-time choice.

This is for life, every day, or our faith becomes unstable because our spirit is willing, but our flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41). Faith makes us stronger, but only when it’s reliant on God’s grace and supernatural intervention in our lives, and not our misplaced presupposition that agreeing with nice thoughts grants us Heaven.

RIGHTEOUS, PURE, AND HOLY

For the many of us who don’t take repentance too seriously, or who altogether misunderstand its fundamental roots, let me say this. Too many of us get caught on believing God is only a God of love and not as a God who demands a higher standard of living from His children. The truth is, He doesn’t invite us to live however we please, but rather, He tells us to pick up our cross and follow Him (Matthew 16:24-26). He tells us to die to our selves, that to lose our life in Him is to gain it. This is not favorable for those who choose to live in sin and claim in vain that since God is love, He won’t mind! God is more than just love, He is pure and perfect and holy. He never condoned sinful living. There was and is always a cost.

The point here is that Jesus paid the price for those willing to see that living our way is the wrong way on the wide path that leads to destruction, and that the only other way requires us to turn towards the narrow gate that few enter through, which looks like repentance; no longer pursuing the flesh and starting to live in obedience to God, no matter the cost (Matthew 7:13-14).

TRUE REPENTANCE, SALVATION, AND FORGIVENESS

Yes, Jesus was meek, humble, and peaceful. But He also paid the full price for our sins, overturned tables and rebuked pharisees. He didn’t love people only by being peaceful, He loved us by challenging us with Truth, standards, and a path to the Kingdom of Heaven through faith in Him.

The thief on the cross wouldn’t have been granted salvation if he hadn’t understood his sin. But through the revelation of his own sin, he could see Jesus’ purity and innocence, and his repentance was laid out in his words for Jesus to remember him in His Kingdom (Luke 23:41-44).

Where there is no true repentance, and no contrite heart, there is no change. There is no salvation for those who like the idea but who don’t receive it in their heart. There is no forgiveness for those who believe they’re forgiven by God, but who refuse to forgive others (Matthew 6:15).

UNPREPARED TO ENTER GOD’S KINGDOM

As a society at odds with itself, Christianity is most called upon to be the example the world needs to see; a true reflection of the living Christ. That is why repentance is such a huge point to knock on, because without repentance, that lack of a changed heart appears to reveal loopholes in Christianity when really the loopholes are in the hearts of people unprepared to enter God’s Kingdom! There are people still spiritually living in the world, enjoying the idea of a risen Christ without actually taking off their old self and putting on their new self in faith (Ephesians 4:22-24). There is no denial, just a falsified and fallacious belief that God accepts us exactly as we are; sin and all. That isn’t biblical. That is deceptive, and it’s demonic.

CONSISTENTLY DENYING OURSELVES

How can God work in someone resisting His biblical teachings? How can He move in those who don’t want to live in the spirit more than the flesh? He can’t, because He won’t force Himself against our free will. He is all-powerful, but He won’t take back the very thing He gave to us: our choice to choose Him or ourselves. He is unconditionally loving just as much as He is absolutely a one-way street; we either love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength… or we love ourselves. We choose to learn to love Him more by consistently denying ourselves on a daily basis until worldly sin looks as filthy as it actually is, or, we continue to see the world as shiny and inviting because our own sin is too thick to see through.

OUR FRUIT SPELLS OUR FAITH

Each of us has that choice. Christianity is the name of that choice. We all make it, one way or another. We all say yes to Christ, or no. And the way we know is by the fruit of each person’s decisions (Matthew 7:16). Our fruit tells everyone which tree we feed from, and when it’s God, it shows in our character, and our lifestyles. If our fruit consistently spells out impatience, volatility, greed, a lack of self-control, selfishness, and a lack of peace, joy, or love… we know the source we’re feeding from isn’t God.

EACH DAY IS ITS LAST DAY

If we’re not feeding on God, we’re not following Jesus. If we’re not following Jesus, we’re lost. If we’re lost, we have to make a choice to follow the only way that leads to life, or continue on another path and make up worldly excuses as to why it should makes more sense to us. Which path are we taking? Which choice we are making? There isn’t much time left. Each day is its last day. To see it any other way is to live foolishly.

Let’s live righteously, in Jesus’ name.

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