“And she said to him, “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me these three times, and you have not told me where your great strength lies.”” (Judges 16:15 ESV)
“And He said to them, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘THIS PEOPLE HONORS ME WITH THEIR LIPS, BUT THEIR HEART IS FAR AWAY FROM ME.” (Mark 7:6 NAS95)
Delilah was a self-serving prostitute, but she did get one thing right with Samson. "How can you say,'I love you', when your heart is not with me?" Jesus said the same thing about the hypocrites in His day, "this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me".
This fits with what I read yesterday in the excellent book by Michael John Cusick on sexual struggle, "Surfing For God". Cusick writes about the surrender principle. He says that our hearts attach to anything to which they have surrendered. That is why it is critical to surrender to the leadership of Jesus in all areas and to root out those areas where I surrender my heart to someone or something else. It is a matter of the heart and surrender is the way to impact the heart.
In the painfully funny viral video called "Shoot Christians Say", one of the trite questions that they mock is the overused, "how's your heart?". Perhaps the better question is "where's your heart?".
Yes, much of surrendering is rooting out the bad--"circumcision of the heart."
ReplyDelete