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A new heart I will give
you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body
the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
Expansive hearts
Real spiritual growth
moves us toward being magnanimous, literally big-hearted. Anything else is an
impostor.
You can know the Bible
front-to-back and be able to quote a verse for every occasion, annoying your
friends while doing so.
You can pray for hours,
meditate on scripture and practice an array of spiritual disciplines fit for a
monk, but if you heart doesn’t get roomy and expansive its all for naught. You
might as well save your time.
If you have not love,
the Apostle Paul says, you are nothing, and you are definitely on the wrong
road, not the way of Jesus, who is the way.
A contemporary
assumption, growing rapidly in recent years, is that being Christian makes you narrow,
judgmental. Christianity gets portrayed as anti-gay, anti-woman, anti- science,
anti-intellectual; you get the idea.
Unfortunately, some Christians,
including high profile preachers, produce enough arrogant, judgmental nonsense to
suggest these perceptions may be correct.
But the real mark of
faith is a new heart, an expansive, magnanimous heart that can embrace others
and this crazy world God so loves.
If you’ve recently accepted
or forgiven someone through a major change of heart, you can be sure God had
something to do with it.
Pr. David L. Miller
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