Supernatural Transformation: Change Your Heart Into God’s Heart (41 page)

God loved us first so that we could love Him and other people.

We should never boast about how much we love God but about how much He loves us. His unconditional love is the solution to many of our needs, such as a lack of identity, feelings of rejection, low self-esteem, and other emotional obstacles that prevent us from having wholeness of heart.

We are commanded in the Scriptures to love God (see, for example, Mark 12:29–30), and this command is not optional. As we have seen, we demonstrate our love for God by our obedience to His Word. We cannot say that we love God and then freely violate His commandments! We won’t fully obey the Lord unless we develop a genuine, deep love for Him, because authentic love for God aligns us with His purposes, motivating us to keep His commandments.
“Whoever keeps
[Jesus’]
word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him”
(1 John 2:5)
.
Love doesn’t compromise when it comes to God’s principles; it doesn’t sin by abusing others. Love will always be the right motivation for everything we do. If we love God, we will guard our heart to keep His commandments; as a result, obedience will become a natural part of our lifestyle.

When we have genuine love for God, we are motivated to obey Him, because real love always seeks to please Him.

To love God is to have a desire to please Him with every aspect of our life—including our thoughts, our words, and our actions. Accordingly, we are grieved when we offend Him. Love always wants to please its beloved. Christ lived His entire live for the purpose of honoring the Father and fulfilling His will—not to be “seen” by others doing good deeds. When love is our motivation, people will see our heart rather than the works of our hands. My motivation for doing the Father’s will comes from my love for Him. His love and His presence in my life compel me to offer my life in service to Him to accomplish His purposes. As my love for Him deepens, I become more effective for Him, and I feel complete.

Genuine love must dwell within us if we are to demonstrate
that love to others.

Is it possible for us to love God with all our heart? Of course we can! But we must make a decision to love God and to receive the love that He has poured out into our heart by His Spirit. To experience God’s love, we simply have to believe that He has given it to us—and accept it! I am never satisfied with just seeing miracles, signs, and wonders manifested, because my chief passion is to know God and to love Him more each day. When we love Him, our greatest desire in life is to experience the manifestation of His presence; then, He gives us everything else that we need, because His love couldn’t give us anything less.

When we love God, our greatest desire in life is to experience
the manifestation of His presence.

In the following testimony, a woman named Vilma explains how the love of God transformed her heart after she had experienced years of abuse and rejection. “I was born and raised in a Muslim home in Albania, never knowing who Jesus Christ was. Throughout my childhood, I never received any love, and the abuse and rejection I suffered led me to be depressed.

“My father never loved my family. In my country, people don’t speak up for themselves, much less on behalf of women. My mother had been forced to marry my father—a violent man who used to beat both of us, who never worked but would steal our money, and who often didn’t even come home. He would frequently take a gun and lock himself in a room with my mother, and I never thought she would come out of that room alive. He would shout at her, accusing her of being a prostitute and claiming that he would rape me in front of her if he wanted to. He never accepted me as his daughter, saying that I owed him everything.

“When I was eleven years old, my mother decided to leave Albania to seek a new life away from him. That was when we came to the United States, penniless and without any clothes except what we were wearing. I felt as if I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, to the extent that I became cold and emotionless. My mother was unable to show me love, so I began to look for it elsewhere. By the time I was eighteen, I had a boyfriend, and I thought that surely he would love me—surely someone in this world would love me! But it was not so. He would tell me that I was fat and ugly and that all he wanted from me was sex. I became addicted to pornography. I no longer cared about anything. I was so depressed that I vomited every day. Finally, I decided I would join the adult entertainment industry. I thought that if no one was going to love me, I would at least gain something out of sex—money, cars, homes, and anything else I could get my hands on. Yet, when I was typing out my application/contract, my computer froze and turned off. God had other plans for me that night.

“I felt so desperate that I ran out of my house in my pajamas and went to a church that was always open for prayer. That night, I gave my life to God and later began to attend a church where I received Jesus as my Lord and Savior. However, I continued to place my boyfriend above God and stayed with him for five more years, until I finally ended that relationship. But I continued partying, drinking, and taking drugs.

“One day, while at home, I prayed, ‘Lord, please send me Christian friends. I am tired of this life.’ A few months later, while browsing a social network on the Internet, I saw some pictures a friend had posted of a House of Peace. I called him and began to attend those meetings, and my life began to change. During a deliverance retreat, I was set free of unforgiveness, sexual immorality, depression, abuse, hatred, and rejection. I was able to feel my heavenly Father saying that I was His precious possession, that He had always been my Father, that He would never leave me, that He knew me and loved me more than I could ever understand. I felt His words penetrate my heart. I experienced God’s love, and He was able to mend my broken heart. For the first time in twenty-five years, I was called ‘daughter’ and not ‘prostitute.’ For the first time in years, I was able to cry out, ‘Abba, Father, I need You.’

“Now I sleep in peace. Evil spirits used to torment me at night, but now I feel God’s presence. The night before my water baptism, my mother, who had been a devotee of the Islamic religion, decided to be baptized together with me. Ever since that time, I have seen the supernatural power of God in my life. My broken heart was healed, and my faith was renewed. Now I am happy, focused on the things of God, and enrolled in nursing school. My desire is to be a missionary in the medical field in India and to take the gospel of Jesus to Albania.”

Prayer to Receive a Heart After God’s Own Heart

As we conclude this chapter, let us ask ourselves some searching questions. If we will be truthful when answering them, our answers will reveal the current state of our heart as it is being transformed to become a heart after God’s own heart. Answer the following questions as honestly as you can: “Do I regularly seek God’s presence?” “Have I become a passionate worshipper of God?” “Am I learning to be obedient and submissive to God in all things?” “Do I repent of sin quickly and wholeheartedly?” “Has my heart been restored to innocence?” “Do I have an attitude of willing service for God?” “Do I have a reverent fear of the Lord, and do I desire to please Him in every area of my life?” “Do I love God deeply with all my heart?”

We cannot reflect God’s true nature unless our heart continues to be transformed into a heart after His own heart—so that we think as He thinks, feel as He feels, and love as He loves. My family members and I, as well as each of the leaders who help to carry out our ministry, have experienced the transformation of our heart, and we continue to do so. We burn with the desire to have a heart after God’s own heart so that we can please Him, demonstrate our love for Him, establish His kingdom on earth, manifest His supernatural power, and see lives transformed by His grace. If anything inspired me to write this book, it was the great need that God’s people have today to experience a supernatural transformation that will give them a heart after His own heart. If you are willing to pay the price necessary for this to take place, I invite you to pray the following prayer:

Heavenly Father, thank You for bringing me this revelation that I need a heart after Your own heart. I want to be a genuine worshipper of You. I desire true intimacy with You, born out of mutual love and respect. I want to serve You as the direct result of my passionate worship of You. I desire to please You and to fulfill Your will for my life in everything I do and wherever I go as a carrier of Your presence, glory, and power to others.

Transform my heart by removing from it everything that displeases You and by filling it with all the qualities of Your nature. Transform my mind and my lifestyle so that I may honor You with every decision I make and with every step I take. Grant me the supernatural grace of Your Spirit, so that everything I do will be according to Your strength and not my own, and so that my life will be a living and holy sacrifice to You that will burn until I take my last breath on this earth. My heart belongs to You. My life belongs to You. My chief desire is to please You always. In the name of Jesus, amen!

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After we accept Christ as our Savior and receive His own nature within us as the
“new man”
(Ephesians 4:24), we are called to experience the progressive transformation of our heart. We do not “sit out” our salvation, waiting to go to heaven or for Jesus to return. Instead, we purposefully and progressively move to higher levels of spiritual maturity as we die to “self” and the sinful nature. We must allow the same anointing from God that saved us to change our heart—a heart that has been corrupted by sin, egotism, wicked desires, perverse passions, emotional wounds, wrong motivations, and many other evils.

Each person experiences transformation in a unique way, because God’s work in each of our hearts is distinct and special. The process is not always easy, and it can be painful; however, after we come through it, we will see supernatural fruit and other manifestations of God’s power in our life, confirming that it was worth it all! (See Hebrews 12:11.)

Our Lives Are Tangible Evidence of the Supernatural

The world wants to know that it is possible to experience genuine change, because transformation is what it desperately needs. Our lives must provide tangible evidence to other people that God is real and that they can have a spiritual relationship with Him that includes supernatural demonstrations. Many things in our world today are being “shaken”—the global economy, nations, leaders, religious institutions, and even the physical world. For example, there seems to have been an increase in natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, and in upheavals in nature, such as drought and changes in weather patterns. Many people are frightened and uncertain about their lives; they sense a lack of stability all around them—literally and figuratively—and they want to find out what is real, what is constant, and what can bring them true purpose in life. If they don’t see supernatural transformation in us, they will not come to our churches, because they don’t want just “more of the same.” They want something that can genuinely address their deepest needs.

We must comprehend that the transformation of our heart is not for our benefit alone but also for the sake of those who do not yet know the God of heaven—the God who came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ to die on the cross to free them from sin and bondage. And now that Jesus has returned to heaven, He has sent
us
to set them free (see Mark 16:15)—He has sent us to be carriers of divine healing, deliverance, and transformation, just as He brought divine healing, deliverance, and transformation to people when He walked the earth. Jesus applied the following prophecy from Isaiah 61:1 to Himself:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.
(Luke 4:18)

When we understand our vital calling as Jesus’ followers, we will seek to remove from our heart everything that hinders us from fulfilling that calling.

Christ’s special anointing—after announcing the gospel—was to address matters of the heart.

Traps of Conformity to Religion

We have seen that one of the chief hindrances to our transformation is conformity—conformity to people, ideas, environments, and situations that are contrary to God’s nature and ways. Traps of conformity are all around us, and we often are unaware of their hold on us—especially traps of conformity in regard to religion. Many people have altered the practice of Christianity so that it has essentially become another religion rather than a relationship with the living Christ. Christianity has been structured according to a human mind-set, so that faith has become formalized and modified; and, under these conditions, people are no longer edified. For these reasons, let us review various types of conformity to religion while examining our own heart in relation to them. We must regularly search our heart for the presence of such conformity in order to avoid being ensnared by these traps.

1. Wanting to Please Others Above God and to
Avoid Controversy

Many pastors today preach a “gospel of conformity”—a watered-down version of God’s message of salvation and transformation—because they are more concerned with pleasing other people than with pleasing God, and they want to avoid controversy. They want to make people “feel good” rather than challenge them to increasingly reflect the likeness of Christ. These pastors promise blessings but leave out the prerequisite of repentance; they offer grace without pointing out the need for obedience and for developing a holy fear of the Lord. Consequently, the power of the supernatural is absent from their churches, because the people have conformed to human egotism and self-indulgence.