"It Must Come From Your Heart"

To pray so that people might call you holy is not to pray at all. That's a show! It is praying to promote yourself, to preach yourself. To give so people will praise your name or know how much you give is not to give at all. That is taking! To obey because "you have to" is nothing more than legalism. We hear of unity but what many really want is comformity. Sometimes people with strong wills or superior strength can force us to mouth or conform to religious acts, but that's not a servants heart. Preachers can make us feel guilty for not "doing the work of the Lord" or not giving enough, so people will give or work out of that guilt. That's not the grace of service or giving! Why am I saying all this? Because there is one thing another cannot do and that is control your heart! People can try to bully people to the knees, but you can't make them pray! You can use compulsion to get people to give, but you can't force them into the grace of giving. You can emotionally intimidate people into reading their Bibles, (let's have a daily Bible reader count each week), but you can't make them love and appreciate the truth. You can make people use all sorts of "churchy" phrases but you can't make them joyously talk about the lovely Master! You can say what you like in religion, but there is a great gulf between the heart of a person responding and a person who conforms for fear of being guilty for not following. You can pressure people to submit to certain things using God and His word as a covering for your personal wants and create a fear that they will be looked down upon if they don't follow, but you can't control their heart.

Everything Christ is trying to lead us in is calling for a heart response. "You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart!" is His calling. Wasn't it Jesus who said about those heartless worshipers, "This people honors Me with their lips but their heart is far from Me."? (Matt. 15:8) If Jesus made anything abundantly clear, it was for people to respond from their heart. You get a persons heart, you get the whole person! It was Jesus who taught, "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." (Matt. 15:18) It was Jesus who talked of the man that looked upon a woman and had lust for her had committed adultery with her in his heart.

We need to take care of our hearts. (Prov. 4:23) What goes in, what is stored in the heart makes itself known in our daily lives. That's why guilt works so well! For many, they know their own guilt in their hearts and have not found a cleansing, so it is easy to get them to conform to religious things because they want relief for their guilt. That is why so many are loveless, empty pretenders rather than a heart responding to do what is right because of faith. People can control a lot of things in others lives with different pressures and scare tatics, but one thing you cannot control in another person is their heart response and we need to stop trying.