Matters of the Heart!

Over the years, I have had plenty of people come to me and say, "Chad one thing I value about you is that you have a lot of knowledge when it comes to the Bible and defending the faith." For a few years of my life, I let that image of me define my identity- and I used my knowledge as a means to puff myself up. As Paul told the church in Corinth in I Corinthians 8:1, "Knowledge puffs up but love builds up." These days, when I an told that I am a person with a lot of knowledge, I immediately draw back and think to myself "Does my knowledge shine more than my heart." More than a person with a lot of knowledge, I would rather be seen as a person that has a lot of heart- and if you don't see that I have a lot of heart then I need to make some serious adjustments.

While my bookshelf has quite a few commentaries, books on church history, as well as apolegetics resources that provide knowledge of my faith and the means by which to defend it and the basic tenets of the faith such as the resurrection, the historicity of the Biblical account, the Trinity, etc- I have realized that God calls us first not to be defenders of our faith, but rather to be offenders of the darkness of sin that entangles and imprisons our hearts from drawing closer to Him.

More than ever, that's what people need to see in us as Christians- is that we are people with a lot of heart. While knowledge does have some value- if it interferes with us getting real with ourselves and truly seeking to know who we are in Christ- then we have a serious error on our hands. It is important for us to understand that our hearts will impact the world for Christ more than our minds ever will.

We live in a world where people are constantly going here and there in order to increase their knowledge. I think knowledge is just one of the many things people try to acquire in order that they can portray a feeling of importance and thus wax over the broken pieces of themselves so that they don't have to get real with the things that really entangle and imprison them. Sadly, this is one of the many ways in which we as "Christians" have started to conform to the ways of the world, to the degree that we even have trouble loving amongst ourselves. No wonder that much of the world no longer wants anything to do with Christianity- all they see in Christians is that we are a lot of talk with little action- a clanging symbol making a lot of noise- but with very little heart.