We see with the eye, but we perceive with the heart. Once that truth takes hold, a whole series of practical questions follows. How does God change a heart? How do I recognise a hard heart? How can I see my circumstances the way God sees them? Here are five of those questions, with the answers I believe the Lord has given me.
How Can I Allow God to Change My Heart?
I don’t think it is terribly hard, but it is not necessarily easy either. I would say, firstly, by seeing our hearts. God sees our hearts, but we don’t usually see our own. The Lord told Israel why He led them through the wilderness. As written in Deuteronomy 8:2, “The Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart.” I believe God knew what was in their hearts before they ever left Egypt. He wanted them to know what was in their hearts.
So often we think we know what is going on in our hearts, especially when everything is good and the sun is shining. Then we find ourselves in a desert, a temptation, a difficult situation, and suddenly Dr Jekyll becomes Mr Hyde. Circumstances reveal the heart. Quite often offence reveals the heart: God will offend the mind to reveal the heart. He does something your mind doesn’t like, and suddenly you find yourself asking, where did that come from?
Secondly, humble your heart before the Lord. The Lord loves a broken and contrite heart, not broken in the sense of “I’m nothing, I’m worthless,” but broken in the sense of “Lord, I need Your help. I can’t do this myself. I humble myself and bring my heart before You.”
Thirdly, ask. There is an old Keith Green song that asks what can be done for an old heart like mine, and answers: soften it up with oil and wine. When you bring your heart into the presence of God, it becomes soft and tender. I remember once fighting God for an entire weekend. I was in anguish. Then I came into a worship service, and I can’t even tell you what happened, but in the presence of God my heart shifted. All the resistance and fight went out of me, and suddenly I delighted to do His will.
What Are the Signs of a Hardened Heart?
A hard heart is intransigent. A hard heart is immovable. A hard heart is proud. A hard heart resists God. A hard heart finds it hard to believe. So often we think we have a faith problem, and we do, but Scripture tells us where faith lives. As written in Romans 10:10, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” It is with the heart that we believe unto healing, unto anything. Believing starts and ends in the heart. If your heart is struggling to believe God, maybe you don’t have a faith problem. Maybe you have a heart problem.
How do we recognise a hard heart? We are hard with other people. We are hard with ourselves. We are hard with God. A soft heart, by contrast, is a heart of love, and a heart that believes.
Years ago God visited me and declared His love towards me. He literally said, “I love you.” One of the major changes that came from that encounter was that my faith skyrocketed. I went back to the Lord and said, “Lord, You told me You love me, and now I find it so easy to believe.” Straight away He led me to 1 Corinthians 13:7: love “believes all things.” When you have a heart of love, you find it easy to believe.
How Can I See My Circumstances From God’s Perspective?
I always come back to the same starting point: ask. Whenever you go through something, whenever you look at something or someone, it should be a baseline assumption that there is more going on than meets the eye. “God, I don’t think I know everything. I don’t think I see everything.”
I’m sure you have had the experience I have had many times. I meet somebody and think I have them all figured out in five minutes. I’ve taken their measure. Then I’m surprised by how amazing they really are, or sometimes by how foolish they are when I thought they were amazing. Whenever we look at anyone or go through anything, we should be saying, “Lord, I see, but I don’t really see, do I? Teach me to see. I want to learn to see differently, that I may truly see.”
So, number one, ask God to show you what you don’t see. Number two, remember that we see through our beliefs. Take a promise from God’s Word, repeat it, put it in your heart and meditate on it, then learn to see through that promise. Say, “If this were true (and it is true) how would the world look? What would that change? How would life look completely different?” As written in Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Put the Word of God on like a pair of glasses, a lens, and look through it at the world around you. You will begin to see from God’s perspective.
How Can I Develop a Biblical Mindset?
I feel as though I am giving the same answer to every question, but it holds true. Number one, see the mindsets you already have. Number two, repent of them. Then practise thinking the way God thinks. Most of us are caught in logic patterns, if this, then that, that have been so trained, programmed and established in our hearts that we don’t even see them coming anymore. We can learn to think differently, but it is usually counterintuitive.
I remember walking in the British countryside along a cliff-edge field, and there was a footpath around the cliff. Crops and grass grew all around me, but here was hard earth, a very clear path. Why was there a path? Because people had walked along it. Then it struck me: because there is a path, people now walk along it. People made the path, and now the path directs the people.
We speak about the neuroplasticity of the brain. We learn to think in certain ways, and after a while the brain wires itself to make that way of thinking easy. Because it is easy, that is how we tend to think. Somebody who has practised saying “I can’t do this, it’s too hard” finds it natural to respond that way. What we must do is start walking down the paths of God. At times that will be far from the beaten path, and we will think life would be so much easier if we went the old way. As written in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
If we keep practising, the new way becomes our path, and after a while it becomes easier to walk. There is a place we can reach in God where the old path is overgrown with weeds, thistles and thorns, and we wouldn’t want to go down it anyway.
How Do I Guard My Heart Against Bitterness?
That is a really important question, and I’m not sure I immediately know the full answer, but here are a few thoughts. Number one, make it a goal, an ambition. We do not want to be bitter in our hearts.
Number two, recognise that every one of us will walk through circumstances where we may rightly feel we are victims of life. We all have the right to play the victim card, and we all tend to look at others and say, “My life has been harder than yours. People have been meaner to me than to you.” I know some reading this have been abused, assaulted, or had everything stolen from them. Life is unfair to everybody; nobody ever promised that life would be fair. You can avoid some things by not making foolish decisions (that is a question of wisdom) but you are going to go through things.
My conviction is this: you cannot determine what you will go through, but you can determine what goes through you, what goes into you, and what stays in you. We should live with an awareness that we are forgiving people, and as a result we forgive quickly and freely. We don’t allow bitterness to come in.
The problem for most of us is that we don’t see it coming. Bitterness is like a little seed that wafts in on the wind: I wasn’t treated fairly. It is not wrong to look at something and say, “I was treated unfairly. They were not just with me.” What you cannot do is keep going back to it. Once you return to it again and again, you have the beginning of a problem. Somebody cuts in front of you in traffic. That wasn’t fair, that wasn’t good, but make the conscious decision to forgive, to let it go and to move on. As written in Hebrews 12:15, “Looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled.”
Those seeds will come to every heart and try to plant themselves. Give them to the Lord. Brush them off and say, “Lord, I am not allowing that here.” Forgive quickly. Forgive thoroughly. Release. If you allow a root of bitterness to remain, one day, when you are not even looking, there will be a great oak tree with roots running all through you.
My advice is to bring your heart to the Lord every day and pray the great prayer of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart… and see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
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Scriptures for Study
Deuteronomy 8:2, Psalm 51:17, Psalm 34:18, Isaiah 57:15, Ezekiel 36:26, Romans 10:10, Mark 11:23, Hebrews 3:12, Mark 16:14, 1 Corinthians 13:7, 1 John 4:16, Galatians 5:6, Psalm 119:105, Psalm 119:18, Ephesians 1:18, 2 Corinthians 4:18, Joshua 1:8, Romans 12:2, Ephesians 4:22–24, Isaiah 55:8–9, Jeremiah 6:16, Hebrews 12:15, Ephesians 4:31–32, Colossians 3:13, Psalm 139:23–24
10 Questions for Reflection
- What recent circumstance has revealed something in your heart you didn’t expect?
- When has God “offended your mind to reveal your heart”?
- What would it look like for you to bring your heart into God’s presence until it softens?
- In which relationships are you hard with others, with yourself, or with God?
- Could some of your struggles with faith actually be heart issues?
- Where do you assume you see the whole picture when there may be more going on?
- Which promise from God’s Word could become the lens through which you view your situation?
- What “beaten paths” of thinking do you naturally walk down?
- What new path of thought do you need to keep walking until it becomes natural?
- Is there a seed of bitterness you keep returning to that you need to release today?
