What’s in your heart?  Is it conquest, a desire to see everything in your sphere reduced to its position under your thumb set in orderly splendor of how you’ve seen the world?  Is it entertainment such that each subject, thing, person or place is measured in importance by how it captures or fails to ignite your passions or attention?  Is it anger, unhealed wounds, putrefaction, judgment and a resolution to withhold forgiveness unless offered at the dying breath of your enemies at the tip of your sword?  Is it hypocrisy demanding that the world conform to a vision and standards that do not apply to your own behaviors?  Is it all of these or some or are you driven by love, because they cannot exist within the same heart, escape from the same well spring or remain housed in the same bank vault.  For they are in direct opposition and will eventually brawl until there remains one true defining influence governed by God or received of the fallen.

We must qualify that we are not discussing intentions or what I commonly refer to as, “Was gonna”.  The best intentioned people have created the some of the most appalling historical disasters, via the tool of unintended consequence.  And history is also ridden with people who meant to do good but were led astray or simply never defeated the torque and friction of their own laziness.  Love is not a philosophy a romantic novelique daydreamed in its bucolic excellence.  Love requires, demands and is defined by action not thought.

Yes, there is a natural relationship between thought and action but let its normal function never be interrupted by a failure to understand that kinship.  Thought precedes every action, but each thought does not have to result in a subsequent action, it may be undone, ignored or die in the dust bin of good intention.  As well, evil thoughts may be brought under the subjection of the Spirit so that they never become sin, captured and never realized.  Good intentions may also go undone, remain inactive within an imagination or avoided by the paralysis suggested of enemy voice or fleshly weakness.  Is withheld action for good, LOVE?  No withheld good action is sin, as stated clearly early in the Book of James.

So back to my heart.  What do my actions indicate resides within, for my actions are the novella of my Kinship with Almighty God?  What I have done, or Not done for the Kingdom of God is the story of my own heart and the answer to the mystery of what lived within it.  Let me never fool you and certainly deceive myself by equating the “story” I tell about what is in my heart with the reality of the same indicated by my actions.  I am not my intentions, I am my actions based upon the driving influence and the purity or poison of my belief.  If I believe in God and trust His Plan and Promise then my actions can only be those of a man committed to obedience and active demonstration of my Love for that Holy God, my Father.  If my actions do not match that “proof” of love statement, then I can safely determine that my heart is not directed by love but by the voice or voices of other gods.

Christianity is not a self-help faith, but it is a faith that demands self-reflective action.  My failure does not demand nor should it sponsor paralytic inaction, rather my failures should be reviewed, submitted to God in prayer, repented of and lead to consequential redirected action consistent with my Love for God.  If it doesn’t smell right then something is stale or worse yet gangrenous.  How’s your heart?  Does it pass the smell test or do you see influences other than Love reflected in your thoughts and actions?  Be honest, if not with me with yourself and certainly with God.  Be led by the Spirit of God’s Love and rejoice in the powerful results of your actions commensurate with the guiding principle of Love.  In Jesus’ Mighty name I pray for you today.