Give Your Heart To God

As Christians, being generous givers is part of our identity. Because of His favor toward us, Jesus became our perfect example; He showed us how to give by giving His very life on the cross. Willingly giving of our time, our talents, and our treasures positions us to receive the blessings that God has already made available to us. However, our hearts are the driving force behind everything we do; therefore, we must give our hearts to God, first, before we can succeed in any other area.

Giving our hearts to someone involves completely opening up to them and becoming vulnerable. This can be risky to do with some people, but never with God. It’s much less scary when we know just how much He loves us. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Meditating long enough on what He gave us in the form of His Son makes us want to give our hearts to Him.

We need to know how much God loves us; this is essential, critical knowledge. There’s an enemy loose in the world who lies to us and wants to destroy us. If we’re unsure of God’s love, we’ll actually believe our enemy when he says that God hates us. This lie caused the children of Israel to rebel against God when they were in the wilderness, and it can trip us up if we’re not careful. “Notwithstanding ye would not go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the LORD your God: And ye murmured in your tents, and said, Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us” (Deuteronomy 1:26, 27).

We live in a hard-hearted world that doesn’t know God. Accepting His love softens our hearts and makes them pliable; rejecting it moves us away from Him. He’s always speaking to us and trying to communicate His love in many ways, but we’ll never hear Him with hardened hearts. “So, as the Holy Spirit says: ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness’” (Hebrews 3:7, 8, NIV).

Before Jesus came, the Holy Spirit was unavailable to mankind. Now that Jesus’ death and resurrection have taken place, the Spirit has poured out the love of God in our hearts (Romans 5:5). Giving of our physical wealth is fine, but what really matters to our Father is giving our hearts to Him. God would like nothing more than for us to be in His presence through a deep, personal, loving relationship with Him.

In the Old Testament, the people were lawfully required to give to God a certain portion of what they owned. They did so out of a sense of obligation, but their hearts weren’t in their giving. Now that we’re under grace, God wants us to give something less tangible but more valuable to Him—our love. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins…We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10, 19). God gave us His only Son, who is love; returning that love would give Him great joy.