Heart Keepers 06 031014

Heart Keepers 06

6.  The realizing of God's presence with us and setting the Lord always before us.

God is always with us.  The Holy Spirit indwells us.  All this is true but do we intentionally set that in the forefront of our minds and the center of our hearts?

Are we desirous of being obnoxiously aware of and desperately desirous of His being always and all ways before us?

Without the practice of the disciplines of the faith, without partaking of His means of grace and His mercies this will never never be the case.  We are but babes in holiness (in many ways but especially in terms of separation from the world).  As babes we need goood food and good exercize.  Without both we will not grow or we will grow poorly.

But we have too much to do.  Too much to worry about.  Too much of too much.  So we nibble a breakfast bar of faith thinking it will provide the nutrition we need for our daily walk.  We crave spiritual fast food and just the occassional healthy meal and think we will be OK.

We set God before us when we are in need; not accepting that we are always in need.  Prosperity and comfort keep us fat, sassy and lost.

Keeping the heart takes work - focused and diligent work - but who has the time?  Who makes the time?  So we stubble along bringing ridicule to the name of God by our shallow, ignorant and intermitant faith.  We violate the first line of the model prayer since we do not "hallow" His name as it should be hallowed.

We do not keep our hearts and so our lives are warped and twisted all the time we claim to be serving the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Jesus made it very very clear that it is our hearts that are the source of evil and it is our hearts we must keep.  It's not a feeling, its facts.  It's not a disposition, it's discipline.  It's not neat, it's necessary.