“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” Matthew 6:21

Our hearts are the treasure chest of our lives.  They are where we store love for our families, our passions, our inspirations.  The heart contains that which we value most in life.  We could love our children, we could love our career, we could love money or travel or whatever but if it is truly something that we love, something that drives our choices, impacts our lives, it is stored in our heart.

For a Christian who proclaims to have given their heart to Jesus, they could ask themselves “have I?  or have I just given Him a place in my heart alongside all the other things I keep in there?”

If we are really giving our heart to Jesus aren’t we really saying to Him take all that it contains and lead us onwards?  Are we giving Him place to challenge what our heart contains, to question it’s content’s spiritual worth, the amount of time we give it in our life and whether we really should hold it so dear?

We need to come to see that to truly give our heart to Jesus is a daily process.  Now this may be a bit of a duh! moment considering the Word tells us to daily take up the cross but giving our heart to Jesus is giving Him our trust; it is to take what Jesus says or leads over what things might look like, or over what we think.

It can seem confronting to hand it all over to Jesus,  to decide to no longer make our own decisions but rather to seek Him in all we do.  It can seem like we don’t get to be who we are or do what we want.

I came to a point where I was challenged to consider whether I had truly given Jesus my heart or whether I had boxed it all up and become territorial about what the Lord can be a part of and what is ‘mine’.

Initially it was  confronting, to consider ‘what if I just gave it all, what if I held nothing back but became abandoned to Him…what if I just surrender..’

We have been conditioned to hear the word ‘surrender’ and take it as defeat, a loss of control, but really that is not the type of surrender that God deals in.  When we surrender our lives and our hearts to the Lord we are stepping into a life of so much goodness it is beyond measure because the surrendered life is the faith life.  To surrender is to walk by faith.  It is to forsake what we see, what we determine and to align our way with the Lord’s.

The moment I decided to truly surrender to God was a pivotal moment in my life taking on a completely different dimension, the faith dimension.  In surrendering to the Lord I have lost nothing of true worth in fact I have gained so much I wish I had surrendered years ago!

The surrendered life is good, so good because God is good and His goodness is pouring into my life in ways I never could have imagined.  Surrender was really giving away all that was a hindrance, all that caused frustration, all that limited God’s grace from flowing abundantly in my life.  Surrender was about developing true faith in God, faith in His Word.

Does this mean life is without it’s challenges? Nope.

Does this mean things will go perfectly everyday? Nope.

But I can tell you what it does mean, it means an inner peace like nothing else; it means a love for the Lord that makes you smile from heart to face; a love for others, to see the Lord work miracles in their hearts and lives; a life that is no longer bothered by little things but rather is full of a hunger for more of the Lord.

The Lord is good, surrender and take Him at His Word; give Him your heart, don’t just keep Him in there….you will never look back!