Joel 2:12-13 says, ““Yet even now,” declares the Lord, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.”
I was first struck by the beauty of this verse – the choice of words, the repetition that I often find myself using in my own writing, and the choice that the Lord is asking us to make. And then I was struck by the meaning. When we stray from God, He asks us to return with “all our heart”. The heart is defined as the “seat of our affections”, the home or root of our affections. To use an example, while our will may drive our car, the heart directs all the turns we make on our journey.
God knows this and chooses His words, “return to me with ALL your heart”. My heart has many loves – my husband, children, grandchildren, friends, dog, reading, writing, quilting cooking. But He wants my whole heart, He wants to be first on my list. God asks for sincere repentence. It cannot be genuine if in the next moment, our heart has our car headed in the same direction it was before. In biblical times, fasting, weeping, mourning and tearing garments were actions of sorrow, loss or repetence but if you’ve read the accounts in Kings and Chronicles, you know that these actions were often following by a return to old habits. God is asking us to “rend our hearts”. There has to be a heart change, not just the outward actions of one. Praise God that as believers, we have received one! 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” Since I am still physically and emotionally the same person, since I’m not any more or less intelligent than before, then what has happened? I have received a new spirit, and that spirit is joined to Jesus. My new spirit has supernatural power! Power to transform my heart, power to transform the direction my car is headed in, when nothing else I tried on my own could.
And who is God when all this is happening? Is He any different? He is the same God, yesterday, today and forever! He is gracious, merciful, long-suffering, doesn’t anger easily, and has a never-ending love for God’s heart is so much for us, that even when we first sinned in the garden and faced eternal consequences, a disaster like no other, He prepared a plan sacrificial like no other, to save us forever.
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