Part 3: Don’t Cling to the Wrong Thing
Jesus Christ said in Matthew 12:35(NLT), “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.” The heart has a treasury. It stores things, and depending on what it stores, the heart will determine what a person produces. Knowing this, we can see the overwhelming importance of God’s wisdom in Proverbs 4:23(NLT). He said, “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.” To guard something is to watch what goes in and what goes out. It’s to take precautions against possible threats or danger. When it comes to our hearts, the threat is a very real one, because the heart determines the quality, or lack thereof, of our lives. So, there can be no question in our minds that the heart is at the core of our being, and what we allow in it can give us more life through Christ or send us spiraling down a never-ending black hole of evil.
The psalmist said in Psalm 51:10(KJV), “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.” Not only is this one of the most beautiful and humble pleas to the Lord, but it conveys what should be the prayer of every person living, or that has ever lived. Jesus Christ declared in Matthew 5:8(NIV) “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” In and of ourselves, you and I cannot make our hearts pure, if we could do this on our own, Jesus Christ would not have had to die. The reality is that only God can create a clean heart within us, and only He can give us a right spirit, but we have to want it.
The heart is where faith gets its start. The heart gives prayer mobilization, and the heart measures the authenticity and nature of our desires. We all have issues and longings; some we’ve been praying about a very long time. Jesus Christ told us in Mark 9:23 that anything is possible if a person believes. Many of us take from this that if something hasn’t come to pass, it is because we don’t believe, or we lack faith. In truth, the problem isn’t always a lack of faith, but it is the thing in our hearts that blocks our faith. It keeps us from believing and trusting God the way we should.
God promised Abraham that He would make him the father of many nations, and that Sarah, his wife, would conceive a child when she as 90 and Abraham was 100 years old. When this promise was initially made, Sarah laughed. Neither she nor Abraham were fully persuaded in what God was going to do for them, but God knows everything. He knew they’d get to where they needed to be in their believing, and He would lead and guide them every step of the way. It was a partnership in the truest sense.
Genesis 12 shows us a little bit about where Abraham’s and Sarah’s heads and hearts were. When Abraham and Sarah traveled to Canaan, the land that God promised to give them, there was a very severe famine there. This was not what they expected. One can imagine that Abraham might have said to himself, “Mmmm, is this really what God had in mind? Did I hear Him correctly when He told me to leave my father’s household, travel all this way, only to get here to find there’s a famine?!!! This can’t be right!” Abraham could have turned around and called the whole thing off, but that’s not what he did.
Abraham had to exercise faith in God’s provision when he arrived in Egypt, and to much degree, he trusted God, but wrong believing was also in his heart. Sarah was exceptionally beautiful, even in her senior years. Abraham believed that he needed to lie and say that Sarah was his sister, so that men of power would not kill him and take her. Abraham’s purpose was to deceive, and the root of deception could not be allowed to incubate with the greatness of God’s promise. There was not room for both. Although the deception seemed necessary in Abraham’s mind, it caused him to cling to the wrong belief that a lie could protect him and Sarah more than the power of God’s truth. Abraham would need to be guided and taught in such a way that he would release this lie. If he had not released the lie, it would have ultimately blocked his faith from manifesting the promise.
The question we must ask ourselves is what we are clinging to that is blocking our faith. There are some individuals that desperately long to marry a compatible mate, and the person they are involved with now isn’t it. The person they are with perhaps doesn’t want to get married and doesn’t have within themselves the qualities to sustain a life-long committed relationship. Yet, many of us will continue clinging to them. We might even pray and ask God to change them or to make them change their minds about marriage, but this isn’t the prayer of a spiritually mature believer. Our Heavenly Father is righteous. He’s faithful to His Word. He will not invade a person’s mind and start moving things around in there. He has given us free-will agency, and He will not violate it.
In our hearts, we are giving in to the fear that we’ll be lonely or that we won’t be able to cope without the person. This is what Abraham did. This fear isn’t sustainable, and will ultimately undermine our efforts towards wholeness, confidence, and faith. The question before us is whether we are willing to trust God more than we trust our fears.
There have been thousands of years since Abraham walked the face of the earth. We’ve had a tremendous amount of time to saturate our minds with God’s Word and to increase our believing. Abraham did not have the benefit of accessing God’s tremendous Word in written form whenever he wanted. He didn’t have God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, dwelling within him, but we do. Romans 8:16(NIV) tells us, “The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.” We must cling to the power, love, and Word of God. This is how we move with victory in the earth. If we seek or feed on anything other than God’s truth, we will cheat ourselves out of the destiny He has planned for us through His Son, Jesus Christ. Our Lord and Savior tells us in Luke 8:15 that if we hear God’s Word and cling to it, we will be good-hearted people who patiently produce a huge harvest.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“The Faith of Abraham, Part 3: Don’t Cling to the Wrong Thing”, written for SMS Member Services.com Copyright© 2023.