“Get your heart back”? Does that line up with your inherited theology? It sure didn’t with mine. The first time I heard that the heart is central and that the redeemed heart is good, everything I had learned growing up pushed back. All my life I had been taught that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”
How like the enemy to twist the Scriptures! If we accept his interpretation of them, the result is never good. If you believe your heart is wicked, you will live that way. If you’re convinced it is untrustworthy, you will shut it down. One of Satan’s great, diabolical accomplishments is to turn us into Tin Men, attempting to do life without a heart.
The power of a lie is that you believe it, and what you believe has authority in your life. But the devil’s accusation that you are wicked at your core—that you are the problem—couldn’t be further from the truth. Not if you’re a believer, “born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:23). Beloved son of God, it is impossible for the Spirit of God to birth something that is unrighteous. He speaks far better of you than what you were taught—and possibly better than you often speak of yourself.
We are the ones Jesus left the right hand of the Father to rescue and redeem. We are the glorious ones who bear God’s image. In this life we struggle with our sins, limitations, and lies of the false self. But deeper than these, who we really are—our core, our heart, our true identity—is stamped with our Father’s nature, having been given new life through the Son and inhabited by the Holy Spirit. We have Trinity DNA and therefore share in God’s glory (much more on that in chapter 14).
The enemy knows better than we do how all this works. He’ll break all hell loose to prevent a man or woman from discovering who they truly are, growing into their true identity, experiencing life and love, and then offering life and love to the world around them.
Friend, you don’t have to try to matter. You matter by right of birth. Your heart matters. It is the treasure of the kingdom.
