Free to Feel with the Heart of God – The Law of Liberty (17)

Free to Feel with the Heart of God

The Law of Liberty (17)

Readers will gain a better perspective on the main teaching of this series by reading The Ground for Christian Ethics, by T. M. Go to www.MyParuchia.com, click Publications, then click Waxed Tablet, and scroll down until you see this little volume.

Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart. I incline my heart to perform your statutes forever, to the end. Psalm 119:111,112

In Scripture, the heart is the centerpiece of the soul, the seat of our affections, the wellspring of attitudes, emotions, aspirations, hopes, and desires. Both Solomon and Jesus warned us to keep a close watch over our hearts, because the primary issues of life flow from that source, and it can corrupt and mislead us, if we do not attend to it continuously.

This is why God requires that we love Him with all our hearts. He knows that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, prone to lead us into false affections, misleading desires, unwholesome attitudes, and vain hopes. When we refuse to love God with all our hearts, our hearts will bend toward mere self-interest. That may seem the thing to do just now, but it usually ends up not as satisfying as we’d hoped (Prov. 14:12). How can we break free of the destructive affections that lead us down wrong paths and into box canyons of disappointment?

We need to set our hearts on a proper course, that’s how. If we incline our hearts toward the Law of God–to seek it, love it, delight in it, and persevere in understanding it–we will find God’s testimonies to be a source of joy and a bounteous heritage to guide us in all our ways. If we try reading and studying the Law of God without setting our hearts on it properly, it will only be a burden we’ll soon enough set aside.

This is a matter for prayer. Beginning there, with prayers such as we find in Psalm119:111, 112, and proceeding on to reading God’s Law, meditating in it, envisioning its outworking in our lives, and going forth to obey it, we can nurture proper heart attitudes toward the Law of God, which will liberate us from our own misleading affections, and allow us to live our lives with the heart of God instead.

Daily meditation in the Law of God helps us along the path of holiness, righteousness, and goodness (Rom. 7:12). Order your copy of The Law of God, a compilation of the Mosaic Law for contemporary believers, by going to www.MyParuchia.com, point your browser to “Publications,” then click on the drop-down option, “Waxed Tablet Publications.”

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore.

T.M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.