All About Heart

Romans 8:1-4

God did what the law could not do. He sent his own Son in a body like the bodies we sinners have. And in that body God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. (Romans 8:3)

HISTORY IS FULL OF Christians who went up against prevailing laws, social structures, and systemic patterns to change the way the world works. That’s important; culture is not defined by its laws, but it is often inhibited or restrained by them. When we change the framework of society to fit with God’s ways, we do a good thing. But if we think that’s where the real battle lies, we will spend our lives focusing on the wrong things. We will be like painters who change the face of a building without affecting what goes on inside of it. We will fight a lot of unnecessary battles.

Many Christians are fighting on political and legal fronts to make society look a bit more like the Kingdom of God, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But the real battle is for the hearts of human beings. If they change, the laws become unnecessary; if they don’t, the laws will always be insufficient. Many of the social trends we want to reverse are better approached through winsome conversations, exemplary attitudes, and appeals to matters of the heart than they are through hard-nosed political talk and legislative threats. The Kingdom of God has never been accomplished outwardly, whether through the law of Moses or the self-discipline of our own resolutions. It has always been a transformation of the inward nature that works its way outward. If we want to see society change, we need to help individual lives change. When they do, society will follow.

Never turn your mission as salt and light in this world into a behavioral agenda. Win hearts, one by one, conversation by conversation with grace upon grace. The Kingdom is built on such things—specifically, the foundation of a Messiah who never overturned a law but has won hearts by the billions. His mission and his ways are yours.

{Jesus, for a people who claim to want to be like you, we have a remarkable tendency to resort to means you never used. Turn our hearts back to the core of our mission. Equip us to win hearts with the wisdom, power, and love of your Kingdom. Amen.