7/63 How do I really Surrender my Heart to the Lord?
We all begin with unregenerate hearts
According to Scripture, the ‘unregenerate’ heart – the heart without God – is the seat of the Self-system, or the Old Nature. It is this fallen, self-centred, rebellious, corrupt heart that has led us astray, Jeremiah 17:9.
- The story of the two houses
Before we came to Jesus, it’s like we lived in a different house. Its run down, cracks in the windows, the doors squeak but we are used to it. Along comes Jesus and offers us ‘a new house’, a new life and we accept.
Everything is all right to start with. Then we start dragging all the old furniture, boxes and whatever into the new house. He might let us live this way for a while but then He says: “How about we deal with all that old baggage, because that purple rug clashes with your broken desk.”
So begins the GREAT exchange – our brokenness for His sacrifice Before we came to recognize Jesus as the One sent from God, our heart was hard, darkened, deceived and double-minded. This darkness started with Adam’s rebellion, but generational iniquity further contributed to our depravity, as well as our own poor choices in life (Ephesians 3:11-20; Galatians 16-21; Colossians 3:5-11; 1 Peter 2:1, 4:2).
- At new birth God softens our heart
Since mankind was/is not capable of keeping God’s laws with the blind, unregenerate heart we inherited from our parents, we need a soft heart to be able to follow God. Jesus Christ was sent to redeem (or ‘buy back’ Matthew 20:28) our heart and spirit (Jeremiah 24:7, Ezekiel 11:19). He wants to give us a ‘new birth’, a new start with Father God (John 3:3). Remember this is an event as well as a process.
The Holy Spirit touches our heart with a ‘gift of repentance’, meaning to ‘agree with God and turn away from sin’. These are necessary tools to deal with our stony heart, because Jesus came to break the power of sin over us (Romans 8:3).
- The heart retains our traumas
Because of the earlier traumas we may have experienced, our heart gets traumatised. When this happens, our heart gets stuck, or stops processing life. Many hurting people have hearts that are only 4 or 5 ‘years old’, when their physical age may be 20, 50 or 70.
- We need to allow Him to touch and heal our heart
We deliberately need to choose to let Him touch our heart, to build our trust and faith in His ways (2 
Corinthians 7:2). We are then ‘reborn’, with a soft heart, to be able to hear and obey God. Only then can we comply with Father God’s will, know His love and be able to seek His Kingdom. We must literally ‘make room for and open our heart’ to receive Him.
- Our heart gets hardened as soon as we are judgmental
Unfortunately, many Christians start hardening their (new) heart soon after accepting Jesus. They don’t understand that God has taken His judgement off us and has forgiven us. He expects us to do the same.
The spiritual world has rules and laws that govern it, just like the physical world. We will discuss today how our childhood survival methods have led us into cycles of bad habits and addictions. We will also consider the fear of rejection, approval addiction and ‘performance trap’ thinking. One area we need to understand is how trauma affects us and then to use the tool that can bring freedom: Inner Healing.
We shall examine this more in another post when we learn to heal the traumas in our life.
Susanne Fengler, Blog Author
www.christianfoundations.jesus-treeoflife.info
Tags: great exchange, surrender heart
Filed under: From Slave to Sonship
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