After God's Heart

...True worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. (John 4:23)

The Lord has sought out for Himself a man after His own heart, and the Lord has appointed him as ruler over His people. (1 Samuel 13:14)

This last verse comes from the story of Saul, the first king of Israel. He had started out his career with a spirit of humility and had been gifted with an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a significant way. He had prophecied with prophets and had been blessed of God and empowered to have everything he needed to be a successful king under the guidance of God.

But his sad story is a reminder that just because a person is “saved” according to the current thinking of this term, and even though that person may even be genuinely filled with the true Spirit of God and display all the evidences of having that Spirit control them in extraordinary ways, it is no guarantee that they cannot later turn their hearts away from that grace and ultimately be lost. There simply is no validity in the once-saved-always-saved theology as taught by many Christians today. If that theory were true then it would follow that any person thus treated would lose their freedom of choice. And freedom of choice is the most important part of our makeup if we are to ever be able to experience and relate to others with real love.

While Saul's story is a stern reminder of the danger of failing to repent and humble ourself before God throughout our life, David is a very good example by contrast of one who clung to God at the heart level despite many mistakes or confused notions about God that marred his life story. The more one carefully studies the story of David the more amazed one may become that God continued to identify him as still His chosen man after all the bloodshed and intrige and even outright deceptions that sometimes marked David's interactions with those around him.

But as God pointed out to Samuel in the very beginning of David's story when Samuel went looking for the one God had chosen in Bethlehem, God looks at people very differently than we do most of the time. We judge the value and integrity of people almost exclusively based on their appearances and their behavior. We sometimes justify that as “fruit inspection” believing that our analysis of others is something Jesus instructed us to do. But most of the time we are actually making judgments of people and determining many things about them that only God is qualified to do. Instead of asking God's opinion and waiting to hear from Him about others, we too often size them up ourselves believing that we have enough wisdom and discernment to figure things out and determine whether they can be trusted or not or even if they are likely to be saved in heaven.

What both of these verses reveal about God is that He puts far more emphasis on people's hearts and their attitude towards Him on the inside than He does on their looks or actions. Our behavior after all is simply the outworking of our confused ideas of reality that each of us contains inside. How others interpret our motives based on outward appearances can never be all that accurate since there is no way they can ever know all the factors of our experience and perceptions that go into causing us to do and say what we do.

But God saw in David a heart that had chosen to seek after knowing the heart of God. David had already chosen for himself, even as a boy looked down on by his brothers and viewed as incompetent and unimportant by everyone around him, that what was going to motivate his life was a passion to know God at an intimate level no matter what others thought or did to him.

When we perceive this when looking over the life of David, then many things suddenly come into perspective. Time and again after making stupid decisions or bad choices, David would realize that he had taken things into his own hands and would humble himself and seek God's heart again. And whether things were going well or things looked hopeless, David poured out his feelings and thoughts into songs and psalms as his heart struggled to express the nearly inexpressable and he yearned to connect and be touched by the heart of his Father in heaven.

I believe that it was this dominating passion of David to keep pursuing the heart of his heavenly Father that motivated God to tell Samuel (and Saul through Samuel) that this David fellow was a person after His own heart. God was not stating as some have inferred that David was somehow a model of what God intended for people to be as far as behavior is concerned. David made many blunders and bad choices that should serve as strong warnings to everyone of things to avoid. But it was the heart and spirit of David that God was referring to when He said David was a man after His own heart.

David – as some have pointed out – was a man quite literally who was AFTER God's heart. He was repeatedly pursuing to know God's heart, to feel and sympathize with God's feelings and thoughts, to be energized by the love from that heart and to receive healing and forgiveness from that great heart of compassion and mercy. David was one of the strongest examples in the Bible of a person who tried to relate to God at the heart level even in a society that was moving in the opposite direction many times. While the nation of Israel was moving away from God and their king Saul was rejecting God's authority in his life personally, David refused to reflect the attitudes of Saul in the ways he reacted when Saul repeatedly tried to hunt him down and kill him. David chose over and over to respond to Saul in the spirit of humility and respect instead of reacting in resentment or wounded pride.

Jesus shared with this woman of Sychar that the Father is still seeking for people who will interact with Him in worship much like David did from his heart. For worship cannot even occur properly or have any effect on us unless it engages us at the heart level and involves synchronizing our spirit with His Spirit. It is not enough to think we can be right with God and somehow get to heaven by keeping rules and being a good person. Righteousness is not about performance, it is something that we only can receive from the only One who is righteous. And the only way to receive the kind of righteousness that God is offering us is to relate to God openly and honestly with our heart, no matter how messed up or hurting or damaged it might be.

God is not in the business of judging us by the quality of our worship or how meticulous we arrange or perform our worship services. God is totally focused on what is going on in the deep recesses of our heart and is looking to encourage every glimmer of response in that area of our being to the constant invitations and allurments of His passionate love for us. And very often the people who are in fact responding and warming to the love of God deep in their wounded, confused hearts have external lives that prevent them from living comfortably in the company of typical religious people. This is seen quite plainly in the types of people Jesus hung around with that would scandalize most of us if those people were to come into our church services and try to honestly express themselves.

But nevertheless the Father is still seeking them. And He is also seeking out the pious, self-righteous religious types who feel so little need of any heart work in their confidence that they have all the truth and that is all they need. The Jews too had all the truth, but look what their hardened hearts led them to do – they ended up killing the Son of God and then rushed home to keep the rules about Sabbath so God would not be offended.

I know that I need much more heart work to come into this kind of worship. But God knows that and is leading me through experiences and personal tutoring using various resources to bring me closer and closer into that kind of worship. As I look back on the way He has led me to this point I am awed at how much my perspective of reality has changed. And from this point forward I have to trust that He will continue to train me, heal me, transform me and finish the work that He has begun in me. He is doing a heart work – as He always does with all who are willing to respond to His leading. I am often both amazed and discouraged at how difficult it is for me to let go of my resistance and fears that are exposed as He brings more light into my heart. But I still keep trusting Him to keep changing and drawing me as He did with David. And if the story of this woman is any indicator, I am excited about what may soon be seen in my life as I begin to drink more deeply of the living water that Jesus is offering to me.