The
Garden of Your Heart
By Brita Crouse
“Hear, O Israel:
The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
Deuteronomy
6:4-5 (NIV)
I
recently read a book where the author compared the human heart to a garden. To
the main character, the garden looked messy and chaotic. But when God was
allowed to prune the garden and replaced certain flowers with new ones, the
garden was more beautiful than ever before.
I
love to be organized; messes stress me out. That’s why it is so hard for me to
desire (or at times, even admit to) a messy, chaotic heart. Instead of allowing
Jesus into all aspects of my life, I compartmentalize and only allow Him into
certain parts of who I am.
But
God hates this. In fact, He says so in Revelation
3:16: “So, because you are lukewarm - - neither hot nor cold - - I am about
to spit you out of my mouth.” He doesn’t want us to be wishy-washy about our
faith. He wants ALL of us. Every part. As commanded in the verse above, we are
to love God with ALL of our heart and ALL of our soul and ALL of our strength.
You
wouldn’t say to your best friend or husband, “I will be open and honest with
you when we are together, but any time we are apart, you can’t know what I’m
doing.” That sounds absurd!
The
thing is: God knows everything about us. He knows more about us than we know
about ourselves. Yet, He doesn’t force us to surrender ourselves to Him. He
wants us to make that conscious effort and choice. He wants us to want to give our heart to Him.
In
this book I read, God says to the main character about the garden, “This mess
is you!... To you it seems like a mess, but to Me, I see a perfect pattern
emerging and growing and alive...” [1]
We
cannot surrender every part of our heart to God without His help. But this is
not a burden to Him. He enjoys helping us through the process of pruning our
hearts. And in doing this, not only are our hearts more beautiful than ever
before, we will draw closer in relationship to our Gardener.
God
doesn’t ask us to have our hearts organized into neat, little compartments.
Instead, He asks us to give Him our heart, our
whole heart, no matter the
condition.
GOING
DEEPER:
1. What are parts of your heart that you are not
giving over to God?
2. Ask God this week de-compartmentalize and
prune your heart.
FURTHER
READING:
[1]
William P. Young, The Shack. Pg. 138,
Windblown Media, © 2007
Brita recently
graduated from Taylor University with a degree in Psychology, has been
attending Oakwood for sixteen years, and is currently a helper for Oakwood’s
Quest 56.
