Advent Day Twenty-One: Hearts

Precious Truth: God looks on the heart.

Today’s Reading from The Word

Luke 1: 26-38
26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”

38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

Hearts, literal, figural, and symbolic, mean love to us. When I see a heart shape, it usually connects with the idea of love in my first thoughts about it… We use it as an icon for all sorts of love. A best friend, lover, something we have a passion for or something we just like alot- we use hearts to represent our feelings about them. Hearts are romantic for the most part but they don’t have to be- sometimes they’re just cute and cuddly.

The Bible takes hearts a little more seriously. Our hearts are receptacles for our deepest feelings, or at least that is where we feel those thoughts, convictions, and devotions are housed.

It is in her heart, where Mary kept all the things that God spoke to her.

Circumstance in life often bring the state of our heart to the fore. Until we are tested by events we don’t always know what is inside our hearts, and we are often fooled about just who we truly are, until those tests help define us.

God, however, isn’t bound by such things when it comes to reading a human heart. And past all the image making, the pretense, or misunderstanding, God reads our hearts to ascertain exactly who we are.
God knows our hearts, and He is able to produce change in our hearts. “Create a clean heart within me”.

These hearts of ours aren’t a character written in stone, but a living, changing person, which gives us hope. Mary pondered the things of God in her heart, and it is such meditation that helps form us.

Science finds the brain and the heart are linked.