Lately I have thought and spoken a lot about the state of our hearts and so thought I would share it here
I am convinced that the only way to navigate life well is to know the state of your heart and to be working to keep it soft and clean, and connected to God.
In the Parable of the Sower on Luke 8 , it describes four types of spoil that represent the state of our heart and over the next few weeks I am going to unpack them.
The first “soil” is that path where the seed cannot take any root and gets carried away by birds. In first century Palestine the paths would have just been hardened soil . So Jesus is speaking of the heart that is hard. When I looked at hard hearts there are two references in Hebrews and one in the Psalms that warn us not to harden our hearts like the Israelites did at Meribah. So what happened at Meribah? We need to go back to Exodus 17 to find out.
When you read the story in Exodus you find that the Israelites were grumbling against God and asking for water while they were wandering in the desert after miraculously escaping slavery in Egypt.
At face value it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for water in a desert, in fact it seems totally reasonable to me! However to read the one chapter without its context is bad biblical interpretation ( if you do this C3 College has a course for you – Bible Interpretation a Online or On Campus- sorry about the shameless plug!) .
If we read the context – God had provided them water by taking bitter water and making it sweet in Exodus 15 and in Exodus 16 he had provided manna and quail for them to eat. He was providing for their needs, however in that moment they forget that God had been faithful to them and would continue to be faithful to them. They forgot the big story of their relationship with God. They were thirsty and probably hot and they wanted water then and there.
I wonder if often this is how our hearts get hard? When we ask God for things that seem really reasonable in the moment and he doesn’t deliver them , we get disappointed. We don’t understand that in the words of the “Man in Black” in Princess Bride that “we have to get used to disappointment” and learn to process it. So to avoid disappointment in the future, we harden our hearts.
We forget to exegete our lives correctly, we only look at the here and now and don’t see the big picture of what God is doing in our lives and even in the lives we are connected to. We take one chapter of our lives out of context and harden our hearts.
We need to be people who keep the big picture of our walk with God in our hearts – to be able to remember how faithfulness to us, our family and friends – and to not expect him to be the Big Genie in the sky – but to know he is a loving Father.
Easier said than done though – any tips ?