Conditions for changing the heart

What if I had only a day to live? What would I tell you? I would tell you about the one thing that has changed my life more than anything else. I have found that God has the perfect conditions for getting a person’s attention, and really changing their heart. When there is one specific circumstance, and it is met with one specific response, it can create the perfect opportunity to change the path you are on in life. It is guaranteed to be effective. The one thing that God has given us to change is this, it is intense suffering, followed by an honest heart felt prayer, with real self- awareness. This combination, I believe, is the most powerful means to cause a person to change into who God intends for us to be.

I believe this kind of prayer will help everyone, but it seems like it is the only way to get some people to see themselves and produce real change. You can truly experience a life that you honestly can see and feel the Holy Spirit producing a change in you. I have found that you have to pray in a way that specifically produces that change that you need from God. In my life I have found that it was not enough to just pray for change, that alone did not change me. For myself it was not enough to try to be as honest as I could be with God in prayer, this still did not change me over many years. My heart was so hard and I was so immature that it really seemed like I would never change. I felt many times like I was wasting my time asking for God to change me. I suffer every moment of my life from the results of who I am as a person.

When I prayed to God, I was just saying whatever came to my mind to say, there was no direction or purpose. I believe now where the real change actually takes place is when you allow the pain of an overwhelming situation to bring you to the point where you are deeply honest with God. You see I don’t think when we pray, we are ever truly honest with God. When times are good, we pray much differently than when we are really suffering. Why is that?

How many times have people found out that they or someone they love has some kind of life-threatening illness, and they find themselves turning to God in prayer? Some will start off their prayer with something like, “God, I know I have not prayed like I should have”. They probably mean that they have not prayed as often as they should have, and not so much that they should have prayed differently during their prayers. But I believe this is actually also true as well. I think if you pray like you only have a few months to live, you will find that your prayers are much more real and you are more honest in what you say. This is what I believe is one of the most important things I have learned in my life. That we talk to God like we talk to other people. When we talk to every person in life, to varying degrees, we have a persona. We are all so afraid to tell anyone who we really are and what we really think.

As I often mention, Jeremiah seven teen nine says, “The human heart is self-deceived above all things.” We are acting and trying to be people that we really are not. We do this with ourselves as well as others in this world, and that has come to be our lives. When we come to God in prayer, we bring with us, not just the same persona, but we can sometimes add on a sense of fake reverence to it. We adjust our persona to be one that we think God is pleased with. We have no idea what we look like and sound like from God’s perspective when we pray. This is why I think suffering is so critical to our lives, it is the essential ingredient necessary for change, because it creates the conditions that can, if allowed, to erode the persona and allow for a person to talk to God from their hearts, and not from their minds.

There is a story in the bible where there are two different people praying very differently, and only one person’s prayer his heard, the other was not. The one to whom God listened to, prayed with an honest evaluation of himself, he was not pretending to be something he was not. The verse that describes the prayer says, “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

We also have an amazing example in the book of Daniel of the power of a prayer with an honest evaluation of oneself and God’s church. These are just some of the things that Daniel was saying to God during this prayer, about the people of God. He says,

“Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come on us, yet we have not sought the favor of the LORD our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth. yet we have not obeyed him. We have sinned, we have done wrong. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you. We have not obeyed the LORD our God or kept the laws he gave us through his servants the prophets. We and our kings, our princes and our ancestors are covered with shame, LORD, because we have sinned against you. We have not listened to your servants the prophets. we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws.

Daniel did not just say these things, stating it as a matter of fact with little or no emotions. This came right after he was hit with the realization that God’s people were going to be in captivity for seventy years. This was shocking news and he was devastated. This incredibly difficult news broke his heart and was the catalyst for the prayer. Daniel was young but still may have realized at this moment, he was going to die in a foreign land, and he would possibly never see Jerusalem again. You can feel the anxiety in his heart coming through in his prayer by the repetition of the sins of Israel. Here is a great example of suffering going straight into a prayer that has an honest evaluation of who they really are. Daniel is not pretending anything good about his people. There is no persona here, just sheer disgust for who his people have been for years. It is one thing to be honest in a prayer. He could have stated facts about how tall he was and the color of his eyes. The key for prayer to be effective is to have the most honest evaluation of yourself, to tell God who you really are, all of it, not just some of it. Daniel goes on into detail about the sins of him and his people. The most important thing we can do in life is to ask God to reveal to us everything about ourselves that we need to see. We don’t do this just so we can know all the things wrong with us. We do this for a very specific purpose. We want to know all of the things wrong in our hearts, so that we can pray to God to cleanse it from us, and remove it in his name, and by the Holy Spirit.

The result of his honest prayer was so effective, that an angel came from God instantly to let Daniel know his prayer was heard. The bible verse says,

"While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the LORD my God. The next verse says, "while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice." Verse 9:23 says, "As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed."

If we ask, “does it always takes suffering to bring us to a point to be honest with God? The answer is “No.” It is not supposed to take suffering to get us to pray this way, we are supposed to come to God honestly but we can’t. We can’t because we live in a world that we create, in our minds, where we believe we are a much better person than God sees us to be. We can’t be honest even with ourselves about us, so how could we be honest with God about us in prayer? The bible is filled with countless examples of people who could not and would not see who they really were, some, even with intense suffering. They died in their sins believing they were wonderful people before God when they were not. The one verse that Jesus gives us is probably one of the best examples of this when He says, “On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’

This is so frightening to read. This person who believes they are saved and going to heaven is not just a person outside of church. This is a person who is attending, not just a regular church service, but a service that is actually casting out demons from people and performing miracles. Yet Jesus declares that He doesn’t even know them. They had such a lofty idea of who they were that even upon seeing Jesus on judgement day, they still believed they were a wonderful Christian. The delusion of this person is so severe, that they are actually trying to argue with Jesus himself, as if He was to stand corrected once they pointed out who they were. Notice this person does not say, ‘I cast out demons, I prophesied, I did miracles.” No one is going to heaven just because they hung around with people at a church. Salvation is not imparted to you because you spend time with godly people and attend service. We must read this verse and be gripped with a seriousness. We must let suffering produce in us a humble heart and pray for the changes it can produce while we are suffering.

The delusion of this person is so severe, that they are actually trying to argue with Jesus himself, as if He was to stand corrected once they pointed out who they were. Notice this person does not say, ‘I cast out demons, I prophesied, I did miracles.” No one is going to heaven just because they hung around with people at a church. Salvation is not imparted to you because you spend time with godly people and attend service. We must read this verse and be gripped with a seriousness. We must let suffering produce in us a humble heart and pray for the changes it can produce while we are suffering.

The bible verse in Hebrews five eight says an amazing thing. It says, “Even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered.” This verse even Jesus benefited from suffering. He turned it into something that taught him to be obedient. Suffering produced a great thing in Jesus. The verse just prior to that one says, “While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God.” Here we get a look at how Jesus prayed, with a loud cry, he didn’t just have a soft cry. During his prayer. He had tears, there was serious emotion when he prayed, he didn’t just talk with little to no emotion.

The bible has everything we need to know clearly and plainly shown to us, but we read it and miss the point so much of the time. Our eyes are shut and our ears can’t hear.

The bible is filled with examples of how God had to get people to feel pain in order for them to come before God with an honest evaluation of who they are, with the intention to change it before God, and by God’s Holy Spirit. We read about how David actually stole a good man’s wife, after lusting over her. He then murders him to cover it up. This has to be one of the hardest things to read about anyone. David doesn’t seem to feel bad and he does not come immediately before God to get forgiveness. The heart is self-deceived above all things. David seems to somehow just acted like it never happened. It took a prophet to confront him straight on with a story about someone killing a man’s only sheep to get David upset, only to realize that it was him in the story. This must have been incredibly painful for David to have this pointed out in such a way to him from God himself. We can now, read thousands of years later, the results of what that suffering and pain produced when David goes with an honest evaluation of himself before God in prayer. For Psalm 51 is that prayer. In that prayer we see again the combination of intense shame or suffering followed by an honest prayer that describes who they are at their core.

 So many Christians listen to messages and think that the idea is to only be inspired by them, but never to use the message itself to probe their own lives. Please don't just listen to what I'm saying and think of someone else that you may know that needs to hear this. Please consider right now your own life and who you really are. Don't wait until Nathan, the prophet comes to convict you because you don't know if God is going to send you someone to confront you about who you are. The purpose of God's word is to use it to see yourself in it. I ask you to consider this, If God was to send you a prophet to convict you of a specific sin, what would it be? Look hard and pray to God to show you, please don't wait like David did. God does not always send specific people into your life to confront you on sin that you are hiding. We are supposed to read this Psalm and we are supposed to dig deep into our hearts to see if there is anything at all that God would say to us and confront us about.

We read in verse five, “For I was born a sinner— yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.” David doesn’t just tell God about the current, specific sin of the murder and adultery. In his moment of shame, David starts back at the beginning. He declares who he has always been since birth. He covers the entire length of his life. But again, his purpose is not to just tell God of who he honestly is. His purpose here is to take this pain and revelation about himself, and in that moment, use it to ask God to cleanse him from this, to remove this sinfulness in his heart from his life. Second Corinthians seven one says, “let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.”

Look at how David says during his prayer” “Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” He is asking not just to be forgiven for this one particular sin, but he is also talking about the future when he says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me.” For we read in verse 17, “The sacrifice you desire is a broken spirit. You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God. This Psalm is one of the most precious scriptures because God shows us so many things about the power of a prayer when there is pain and an honest evaluation of ourselves in prayer, with the intention to use it for lasting change.

Perhaps someone you love has just died. Perhaps your spouse has left you and has been unfaithful in the marriage. No matter what your crisis is, that is causing you to suffer, the good news is that we can turn to God in prayer at this time of suffering. If we come to Him, and let that pain inside us produce an honest evaluation of ourselves, we can find healing and lasting change in our lives.

This can be one of the most productive moments in your life. Although we all dread suffering, we can begin to now see, from God’s word, that suffering is an essential element that can be used to cleanse us and purify our hearts, and change our lives for the better. We can live without the fear of suffering. We can look to see the good that suffering can produce and find change in it, the way so many people have throughout history, in God's word.