Deuteronomy 30:1-10
Much has changed since these ancient words were written and yet nothing has changed; heart disease is the leading cause of death among human beings. I’m not speaking of the heart – that blood pumping muscle of our physical bodies but the heart – that potential spring of spiritual life within us.
In our passage Moses is speaking of Israel’s heart condition as a qualifier to inherit their promised land and the blessings contained in it. When they get their hearts right, the Lord will then gather them and set them up in a place of abundance and prosperity. This sounds good until we see the word “all”, the most dominant word in this passage.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.
All is an impossibly high bar to clear. It would require a miraculously true heart to pull this off and obey all the commands. The good news embedded in Moses sermon is the future promise of this new heart. He calls it a circumcised heart and from it shall flow love and life (and abundant material prosperity?)
Then the Lord your God will prosper you abundantly in all the work of your hand, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your cattle and in the produce of your ground.
If we were to truly see what God has offered men with the New Covenant, thoughts of material prosperity would not come up because it pails so in contrast to the true treasure that we are offered.
I believe that being in Christ and Christ being our life is facilitated by the Holy Spirit taking up residence in our spirits. It is the Holy Spirit’s presence in our hearts that begats new creatures. That we become sons and daughters of God means so much more than getting our souls saved and going to heaven. It means living life now as God’s children and processing everything through that new reality. This to me is abundant prosperity. This is living with the new heart God foretold so long ago. This enables us to live this all-in life.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.
For a variety of reasons though, we still have heart problems. We fail to see the abundance of what we have by virtue of what we have become. Our being in Christ is super abundance beyond our comprehension. Even a new heart is not immune from deception and most of us find ways to miss the central point of life – Jesus Christ. This man, our elder brother, the first born of a new race of men, the second Adam is our life independent of our doing.
When doing precedes being, the train is moving backwards. The deception lay in that we think it is taking us to higher ground . In truth, the believer who is resting in God’s amazing love is the son or daughter who is living by faith – the only way to please God. This saint is connected rightly to the engine and is traveling in lofty kingdom realms each day of his life.
Father, only you know how to raise up children in the Truth. Let us abandon ourselves to the reality of your fatherhood. Teach us to live from our new heart which is Jesus himself, the only hope for life. May this tribe of saints arise and with their lives being liberated one lie at a time reveal the transformational intentions of the new covenant. Let the world see that Jesus Christ reigning in individual hearts transforms us into the image of Christ – that one thing that all men must have in order to truly live. Expose the cheap imitations and the places our hearts are unwisely invested. Draw us back to simplicity of devotion to Christ and reveal your abundance. For your name’s sake.