Gaining the Heart of GodSample

Day Three: A Hopeful Heart

Do you have hopes of a better life, family, or community? If change is something we find ourselves hoping for, we need to be honest and understand that the change we want to see around us only happens if it starts within us. The first step to finding God’s way for our lives is facing the realities in our hearts.

We can go through most of our lives without facing what is in our hearts. Then, one day, we take an honest look at what is really motivating us and we’re humbled to see where our best intentions are actually leading, and it’s so far short of where we actually want to be. 

In the book of Luke, Jesus’ teaching brings a certain ruler and his disciples to the point where their hearts are in their throats because he is causing them to see things within themselves they didn’t know were there. Jesus has these incredible stop-you-in-your-tracks sort of moments with people for a reason. He wants them to hear, and really get into their hearts, that which will produce a return of amazing abundance in their lives.

How do you think the disciples responded when they heard the kind of abundance Jesus promised they would receive? It’s likely that at least a couple of his disciples probably chuckled under their breath—because it’s laughable! And it should be laughable—that’s the kind of storyteller God is. As Frederick Buechner writes, “Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all?”

So, when Jesus lets us know nothing is impossible for God, he is telling us of an abundant kind of life, the likes of which we can’t even imagine; he’s telling the same comedy that God has always been telling. He wants to make our hearts bold. But to do that, he wants to change the dreams of our hearts from ones that we can fulfill to ones that only he can bring about. Think of dreams like these, and then let God lead: a child's heart coming clean and resting at peace; a deeper love with a friend or spouse; a way that your work could become more than a job.

Reflection: God wants you to find and follow his way to new abundant life. How can you see Jesus' "impossible" good news in your own life?

Prayer: "God, I love you, but get lost at times in my own understanding. Would you rescue me now and bring me to the place where I can see the way you are leading? Amen."