Guidelines For Living

Guest (Male): Take a break from your busy schedule and join Harold Sala for Guidelines for Living.

Harold Sala: A friend of mine was eulogizing a man who had suddenly passed away saying, "He had such a good heart." To really know the heart of a person means going beyond the veneer of respectability, getting to know a person from the inside out. Occasionally we talk of intimacy with somebody saying, "He really opened his heart with me." Something we're not often prone to do.

If it's true that we seldom bare our hearts to each other, and I think you would probably agree that that's the way it is, is it possible that finite man can ever really get to know the heart of God? I mean, bringing it home where you live. Do you know the heart of God? Can a human, any human, ever get so close to the Almighty that he can even in a small measure understand God's heart?

There are some barriers that usually stand between us and a knowledge of God's heart, barriers which can come down. The first that keeps us from knowing the heart of God is the simple fact that we often don't know God. So the first step in righting that situation is understanding you were made in the image of God, not God made in your image. No one can really understand God's heart until he first understands that man's heart has been darkened by his rebellion against God.

In the days of Noah, the Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain, so says the book of Genesis. Now, a second barrier that you need to take down before you know the heart of God is to overcome your preoccupation with yourself.

Long ago God said, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." And that promise is true today. But when we are only seeking handouts from God, thinking that he's a divine office boy to do our bidding on command, our focus is need-centered, not God-centered. To know the heart of God means you need to focus on him. Get to know him, strive to see life from his perspective, and understand how different is his view of our life and our problems. To know the heart of God demands changing your focus from yourself to him.

The third barrier that must come down if you are to know the heart of God is your ignorance of the nature and character of God. Long ago the prophet Hosea wrote, "My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge." And his lament is far more descriptive of our generation than any one in recent years. A.W. Tozer wrote, "The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms are used to express the knowledge of God as are used to express knowledge of physical things."

Your physical senses, friend, can bring a knowledge of the Almighty in the same way they bring a knowledge of your best friend. But there is one more barrier that must be crossed. It is overcoming the barrier of our lack of knowledge of his written word and the incarnate word Jesus Christ. A relationship with Jesus Christ opens the window of understanding to the heart of the Father. And to know him requires an understanding of God's word, the Bible.

Now going back to that initial question, can you really know the heart of God? Absolutely you can, and knowing the heart of God will bring all of life into focus. The path of discovery is the way of life itself. And friend, when you know God, you will know yourself better than you ever have before.

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