Into The Heart Of God – Heidi BakerSample

Passion

Jesus loves us so much that He never leaves us the way He finds us. His love often starts with a question – a question that reaches down from the safety of our minds right into our hearts.

Do you love Me?

Often we are too quick to answer when God asks a question of us. Usually our hearts haven’t fully grasped what He wants us to understand. God is looking to affect our hearts more than our minds. He wants to wreck our hearts – in other words, to change the way our hearts feel about things; to change the way we react to the situations that exist in a broken world.

The Scripture says, “Love the Lord your God ... with all your mind” (Mark 12:30). We are called to love God with every fiber of our beings. All of us, in our entirety, must be wholly given over to the Master – our hearts, our souls, our minds, our emotions. God wants us to be fully yielded to Him with reckless devotion. To “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). This is passion! Let us determine to live lives abandoned to His love, lives made up of passion. Decide to trade the worst for the best, death for life, darkness for light.

Paul wrote that “…whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ” (Philippians 3:7), and said that all the things he had sacrificed in his life were “garbage” compared to gaining Christ as his Lord.

In surrender we actually lose nothing. We stand only to gain. We are gaining a life lived in His love. An oak tree starts life as an acorn hidden in the dirt. Nobody would even know it was there. But contained within that tiny, hidden thing are all the makings of beauty, might, splendor, and shelter. The little acorn simply takes a lifetime to become all that it was always meant to be.

Before anything else, beloved, we are His, hidden in Him. Today, let go of anything you’re holding onto that may be preventing you from pursuing Jesus with passion.