The Lord frees the prisoners.  The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.  The Lord lifts up those who are weighed down.  The Lord directs the steps of the godly.  He delights in every detail of their lives.  Though they stumble, they will never fall for the Lord holds them by the hand.  The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.  The Lord is good and does what is right.  The Lord leads with unfailing love and faithfulness. The nuggets you just read from the Psalms all represent truth, but do they represent the truth of our own personal thinking?  We can know the facts of truth in our heads, and live by a thinking in our hearts that is much different.  I spent over twenty years of my adult life questioning my relationship with God because I was not living by and responding to the truth that God’s grace is bigger than any sin I had committed.  When I was inappropriate in my responses to my children, I would totally berate myself because in my heart-thinking, God had no patience for such things and He was an exacting, demanding God.  Likewise, as the years went on, and I began to not only know and understand God more accurately, I also began to make a heart connection with truth.  I learned that He cared about every detail of my life, and that truth allowed me to crawl up in my heavenly Father’s lap, and know the warmth of His embrace at times when my spirit was crushed and trampled.  I learned to give my fears to God, because I knew He had something better to give me in place of them.  What we know in our heads is not what shapes our relationship with God, but what we know and believe in our hearts.  

Truth though must still find a place in our heads before it can reach down into the inner recesses of our hearts.  Therefore, we must expose ourselves to truth so we can learn its facts and its principles.  With that head knowledge, we can begin to allow the truth that is there to shape our responses to what is going on in the private, and not so private, parts of our world.  God becomes our focus, and all that encompasses God and godliness, and a relationship with Him, become the breath of our responses.  And so grows our heart knowledge, our heart-thinking, and our ability to live out truth in a very real and personal way.  Easy? No, because the enemy of our hearts will wage a battle against our hearts, and by ourselves, that battle will be a losing one.  Therefore, when we need to change lies to truth, when we need to think truth before we react or fall apart emotionally, or whenever we simply need to own truth on a personal level, we do it with God.  We go to Him; we actively depend on Him.  We go over and over again, if we need to.  We may be misguided by detours, or we may stumble over hindrances, but we continue to pursue, and we will find the incalculable joy of a relationship with Him that is shaped by heart-thinking.

– Bev