Don’t Follow Your Heart… Pray For It.
You know those mundane moments in your day? The ones where you find yourself doing a mindless task like washing dishes or folding laundry or stirring dinner on the stove and you easily space out until it is finished? I see these moments as windows of opportunity to lean in with your spirit and pray prayers like these: Meet me here, Holy Spirit. Give me a burning heart. Knit my heart to yours. Fix my eyes on you. Draw me deeper into your love. Protect my love from growing cold. These are prayers that feed our spirits and keep our faith alive and well. Only God can impart into us what we need to follow and love Him faithfully through every season of life, and that is why I believe these are prayers that He is so ready to answer! He is waiting to say yes and pour fresh fire and oil into willing and open hearts!
We are in an hour of so much noise. So many voices. So much information. It’s a time when anyone and everyone can have a platform and make a proclamation. It’s a time when the world is screaming at us to follow our hearts, obey our feelings and do whatever feels right. It can be easy to bounce around from voice to voice and get lost in the noise, all in the name of pursuing truth. Meanwhile, our hearts become dulled, distracted and unguarded from all this noise because we have forgotten how to be still and quiet and listen for the One voice that really matters - the voice of our Creator. We need discernment to know how to navigate through these times. We don’t need to follow our hearts, we need to pray for them.
The heart, when allowed to lead, can be dangerously swayed, easily offended, and ultimately misguided and deceived. Now is the time to expose evil that is running rampant, but it is also FIRST a call to examine my own heart and expose any darkness that may arise in me before I attempt to call it out anywhere else. Now is the time to check and guard my heart from fear, anxiety, envy, pride, offense, and hatred. No other voice can do this for me. I am responsible for my own heart. I am responsible for stewarding it, for guarding for it, and for aligning it. I can only truly do this by submitting my heart to the leadership of the Holy Spirit and inviting Him to keep me centered in Jesus. It is from this tethered place that I can be assured that I am rooted and grounded in truth with a pure heart before the Lord. Only then can I lovingly make a lasting impact proclaiming truth boldly to my sphere of influence. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37-39
It is crucial that we pray for our own hearts regularly, even to command them through times of testing and confusion. We see this modeled in scripture beautifully by David in the Psalms. In one account, David prays for and declares over his heart saying, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God.” Psalm 42:5 When we declare truth over our hearts, we are commanding them to align with what God says about who He is and who we are in Him rather than agreeing with the often oppressive weight of our feelings that can’t be trusted. When Jesus taught us to pray through the model of the Lord’s prayer, he prayed, “And lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil.” Matthew 6:13 This is a prayer for the heart to be guided, led and protected from deception. It is absolutely necessary to cover our own hearts in prayer regularly.
As a believer in Jesus, it is my inheritance to have a vibrant, strengthened, and discerning heart led by the Spirit, but if I truly want it, and I want it to withstand the hard seasons of life, I must invest in praying these personal prayers and making these declarations from the Word over my own heart. The enemy is stealing, twisting and destroying truth at an ever-increasing level. I need my lamp filled with oil from a personal history in God and a constant growing, intimate prayer life in order to navigate through the deception and remain pure-hearted to the end.
People, go pray for your heart!
