With the heart man believes

WITH THE HEART MAN BELIEVES

There is a lot of speculation these days about what faith really is, especially among Evangelical Bible believing Christians - What to pray and how to pray, what to hope for and what to expect. Many things are being claimed by faith and do not come to pass and many get disappointed, and some think that God has forgotten them or didn’t hear their prayers. Is there something that maybe needs to change in our thinking about our faith? 
What in fact IS OUR faith? What do we believe and how do we believe?

The Bible says that with the heart man believes’ (Romans 10:10) so I would like to discuss today the matter of believing with the heart. I will start by saying that I personally have a very simple and straightforward approach to believing with my heart.
There is an ongoing dialogue with God on a schedule of prayer concerns that sit in my heart and are being placed before him. I also believe that the Father knows what the cry of my heart is in any personal situations of my own and that Jesus will intercede on my behalf to the Father and that his will shall be done in my life for them. That way I am confident that God is doing the supernatural work and I try to stay at rest in my soul, ready to do what work The Holy Spirit prompts me to.

Our deepest beliefs and values and desires reside in our heart and flow out of our heart as the real issues of our life. The heart conveys who we are and what we do.
Proverbs 4:23 Guard your heart with all diligence; for It is the outflowing of your life. 

So how do those beliefs and values and desires get into the heart?
Our heart is informed by our mind as to what it acknowledges as being true and of highest value to us and therefore worth living for.

However we will be discussing today the difference between what our natural rational mind informs our heart of in contrast to what our renewed ‘spiritual mind’ informs our heart of.

Our Natural mind
As far as our natural rational mind is concerned, on the one hand it can certainly be convinced of high moral standards and virtues and aspire to those values and convince and persuade the heart so that there is an outflow of civility and decency in that person’s life. On the other hand the natural rational mind can be deceived into accepting corrupt or hurtful attitudes as being the most rewarding things to convince and persuade the heart of and they will become a destructive outflowing of that person’s life. 
We see the panorama of all of those states of the heart (including our own) being played out in the world around us (Mark 7:21. Jeremiah 17:9)
The natural human mind is a wonder of God’s creative genius and it has brought into this world both great good and great evil. We can’t live without our natural rational mind but we also can’t let it run our lives when it comes to our inner being, our ‘God with us’ spiritual life of faith. We need another kind of mind with a higher order of knowing and understanding truth than just the natural rational mind.

Our renewed spiritual mind

When Paul wrote to the churches (ALL of them) he instructed the newly converted non-Jewish Christians about not being conformed to the rational natural mind of the world. This was a huge and fundamental change of thinking for these novel disciples that Paul saw was vital for them in the new Kingdom age of the life of God within us. (Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians, Philippians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus)
The heart of faith gets informed of spiritual truth by the spiritually renewed mind, and that renewed mind finds its home in the new heart that is part of God’s Promise to us (Ezekiel 36:26 a new heart I will give you). That new heart is the place where faith dwells. 

Paul wrote to ALL the churches that were in his care about the spiritual renewing of the mind. He spoke to them about how to know God by faith and how to be known OF God by faith. But he also taught them how to see themselves as being part of the life of God. This was a revolution of thinking - and it still is!

When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church (1Corinthians 2:14) he was writing to people who had lived within their Greek philosophical and religious culture and had been steeped in all those customs and behaviours in their natural minds. 
He told them that their natural rational minds (psychikos – soulish mind) could not receive the things of the Spirit of God because those Spiritual things were irrational (m??ros; absurd) to them; and that they couldn’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned, and that only those who were spiritually minded (pnematikos) could discern those things.

Paul finished that topic about having a spiritual mindset by writing to the Corinthians that they could have the mind of Christ. This does not mean that we know the all the content of what Christ knows, but that we can think like Jesus thinks! And we can know what he reveals to our hearts by the Holy Spirit! Paul also wrote to the Philippian church and entreated them to have this mind in you which was also in Christ (Philippians 2:5).

When Paul writes to the Ephesian church (Ephesians 4:17-20) he tells them that they needed to think differently and to live differently from all the gentile unbelievers around them, who didn’t know the Ten Commandments and who had all kinds of ideas about what religion or morality was (similar to what we see around us today). He spoke about those unbelieving people as being ignorant of God and resistant in their hearts to God. They were alienated from the life of God because of an uninformed mindset of separation from God. He goes on to say to the church ‘But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught the truth concerning him as it is in Jesus. 
Paul had taught them of the gift of the life of Jesus within them that changes their old self life with its natural mindset and natural desires of the heart into a new self in Christ with a new mindset and with new Spiritual desires in the heart. 

He says to them ‘put off your old self, which belongs to your former wayward way of life and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God.
This is not just a different thing to think but it is also a different way to think. 

This is actually what REPENTANCE is! 
But isn’t repentance about turning away from sin? Yes – but how do you do that? 
Do we simply tell people to make a resolution to use more will power and stop sinning?
The word repentance (metanoia) means ‘A change of mind’ a 180 degrees turnaround!
Only our renewed mind understands the Spiritual reality of a life of putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God. Our renewed spiritual mind informs our heart of that truth and that becomes believed upon in our new heart and that becomes a new way of living. That is the only way we can live above sin (1John 3:9). That is the repentance that leads to faith, and this is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, sent to convince the WORLD of sin, because of their unbelief.

This putting off the old self and being renewed in the spirit of the mind and putting on the new self is to be an everyday activity for us all! We move in and out of our natural rational mindset and have to re-engage with our renewed Spiritual mindset a lot of the time.

The best that a person could obtain in the Old Testament as far as a pure mind is concerned was to revere the Ten Commandments that God gave Israel. This is what David did, and he shares his love for God’s Commandments throughout the Psalms and speaks about how they restored his soul and enlightened his eyes (Psalm 19).
And Psalm 119 contains 176 verses speaking about nothing else except David’s love of God’s Law. We see the effect of this upon David in that he was a person of faith and was called ‘A man after God’s own heart’.
  
But Paul was offering those gentile churches a Gospel of a totally new measure of truth and grace and faith through Jesus Christ that was above and beyond the Old Testament faith experience or comprehension. This was a New Word, with a New Voice, the Voice of Jesus.

Just one Voice

Hebrews 1:1 God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;

The voice of God’s Son is better than the voice of the prophets. This was the motive of the epistle, the purpose of the letter, and the heart of the message of the Book of Hebrews. When Paul comes to the faith chapter (Ch.11), he shows us the faith of the patriarchs and prophets, from Abel, and Noah and Abraham through Moses and Gideon and David which were counted to them as faith – It was the faith for that time. Then Paul tells us that the faith of Jesus in comparison to those works and words was something far greater. He closes that faith chapter with the words, “God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.” 
In other words, their excellent faith for those days was waiting to be completed by the new kind of faith imparted by God himself through Jesus to our hearts.
And he begins the next chapter (12) by saying that Jesus is the author and finisher of OUR faith.

Looking to Jesus

We look to Jesus who is the Author and Finisher of our faith. In other words, all true faith now begins and ends in Him. 
Hebrews 12:2 looking unto Jesus, the author (archegos – primary bringer of) and finisher (telei??t??s –final goal achiever) of our faith…

When faith is needed, it will not be withheld. We can always be assured that Jesus is interceding for us to the Father for his will to be done in our lives.

Our faith comes from the heart of Jesus into our heart.

If someone tells me that they have received real faith for a situation I would sincerely assume that they received it from Jesus, and that they heard him (I don’t mean audibly). That is what Paul wrote; Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word (rhema – utterance) of God. (Romans 10:17) 

But can’t we just read a Scripture and say we will receive it if we believe it and just claim it? To that kind of question Jesus said;
John 5:39 You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
So our spiritually renewed mind can go to the Scriptures to receive truth about Jesus, but our heart needs to go to Jesus and wait for him to speak his truth to us.
That way you read truth with your renewed mind, and you hear Jesus in your heart, and you will see his supernatural work on your behalf. 

To believe in healing or any other supernatural work of God is one thing; but to have faith for it is altogether something else. 

If you receive healing or any other supernatural work of God, it will be because of the impartation of His faith; it will be because Faith has flowed out of His heart into yours; and that is the only faith that brings about the work of God. 
And you can have it; for He does give it! Then you will know that your faith, your ‘shared with Jesus’ faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8).

The wonder of the gift of God lies in the fact that faith for any supernatural work of God is frequently imparted to us as a gift when we feel the least deserving of it. It is not always the product of our loyal ‘exercise of Godliness’ and our faithful waiting upon him, for God hears the cry of our human heart when we can’t even put a prayer together in our heads. God says he dwells in a high and holy place, and with the humble in spirit, to restore the spirit of the lowly and revive the aching heart (Isaiah 57:15)

And even when we are faithfully being ‘exercised in Godliness’ and seeking after God from our hearts we will not always feel that we’ve received faith from Jesus for some particular request. 
But we can always know that we do have Jesus! 
So our faith is never far away because Jesus is at work on our behalf in the world of the unseen. We can remember the words of our Lord, ‘Without me you can do nothing’ and be comforted that being ‘with him’ in our heart is certainly the best place to be.

Pray and ask anyway

When we bring a prayer request before God, be it for guidance or spiritual understanding or healing or any other spiritual or material need we can wait on God for the witness of the Spirit – for the faith OF Jesus. If we receive that then it is a gift from Jesus. In the meantime we have made our request with sincerity of heart and we surrender the request from our heart to God’s heart. That is the most and the best we can do. We then leave it in God’s hands and trust the Holy Spirit, and Jesus, who is the one who intercedes for us according to the will of God (Hebrews 7:25. Romans 8:27). Then that peace of God that surpasses all understanding can be ours. The following Scripture tells us that both our heart AND our mind is being guarded or protected from fear and anxiety through Jesus Christ
Philippians 4:6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

So how do I know I’m believing from the heart and not my natural mind?

When we are genuinely seeking to believe God and yet somehow realize we are still functioning in our natural minds we become more aware of the way our emotions get attached to our thoughts. The anxiety digs in and the doubts line up waiting for our attention and our sense of God’s peace seems to vaporize. That doesn’t have to be a problem as long as we become aware that we need to make the shift of bringing our mind into the heart. We recall to mind his love for us and cast our cares upon him.  
All things are possible to those that believe, but it is important to know how you believe.

The imperative from Jesus has always been ‘seek first the Kingdom of God’ That is why the emphasis is on the surrender of the natural to the spiritual and being aware of our human shortcomings as well as God’s gracious provision for us. Then we can know that Jesus will be to us all he has promised to be, first spiritually, and then physically and materially. This is the renewing of the mind, aligning our minds with the mind of Jesus who emptied himself from his ‘me-self’. 
The pathways of the mind into the heart are being formed each time we let go of one direction of the mind and move into the other, continually returning to ‘God with us”
Amen!