THE HEART

“Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings. As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool. A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary. O Lord, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters. Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for thou art my praise. Behold, they say unto me, Where is the Word of the Lord? let it come now. As for me, I have not hastened from being a pastor to follow thee: neither have I desired the woeful day; thou knowest: that which came out of my lips was right before thee. Be not a terror unto me: thou art my hope in the day of evil. Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be confounded: let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed: bring upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction. Thus said the Lord unto me; Go and stand in the gate of the children of the people, whereby the kings of Judah come in, and by the which they go out, and in all the gates of Jerusalem; And say unto them, Hear ye the Word of the Lord.” Jeremiah 17:5-20. 

“Father, we just pray for our heart. Father, we have to guard our hearts, for out of it flows the issues of life. Father, You said our heart is deceitful and wicked above all things, and who shall tame it, who shall know it. Father, You know everything. You know every thought, every motive, everything, O God. Father, I ask You to give us clean hands and a pure heart to worship You, a pure heart to love You, and a pure heart to obey You. Father, I will not exalt my situation. I will not exalt my persecutions. I will not exalt what I think is right. Father, I know that You know all things, and all things work together for good for those who love You and are called according to Your purpose. My purpose is always Your purpose. You created us for Your purpose, and it has been so amazing.  Even if we get distracted from Your purpose or if we get out of Your purpose, You use all of it to create good. That is wonderful to know that You are God, and we are not. Work in us Your good pleasure. Father, I know the devil would like to get into our hearts. See, the devil was working on Judas, but he got into his heart. Father, You said that our heart is like a place where everything comes from. The source of all things is the heart of man. Father, show us that Your Word is a protection for our hearts. Father, we forgive not because we are right but because You forgave us because we were sinners. I pray, Lord, that everything you have me to do, I do it all for Your glory and praise. 

Father, I am not to work out everybody else's salvation. I will work out my own salvation. I pray that everyone works out their own salvation with fear and trembling. Father, I thank You. I thank You, Father. You always prevail! Father, we give you our heart, God. The heart is wicked above all things, and it can deceive us if it is not for the grace of God. Father, we humble ourselves under your mighty hand. Father, Your ways are higher than our ways. Your thoughts are higher than our thoughts. The more we come into You, the more we see everything, but it is not for us who see to take offense for the Lord. It is not for us to hold a burden upon ourselves. Father, give us eyes to see and ears to hear, not only eyes to see what You see, not only ears to hear what You speak, but teach us to how to guard our hearts. Jesus, You see every motive, every situation. There is nothing hidden. Nothing at all. No fig leaves. No excuses. No debates. No pride. Nothing can hide our hearts from You.” 

I believe the Lord is giving the eyes of fire to His remnant. The eyes of fire see through everything but do not judge anyone. Once we know the things that He shows us, and once we know Him, we will understand that the things that bother us do not even bother Him. Some people who don’t know Him are led by the letter, and they don't even know what God wants and what really bothers Him, which is hypocrisy, manipulation, and unforgiveness. Those things come from the heart, and that is what defiles a man. He said those are the worst things. It isn't even falling into things of the flesh. It is the things of the heart that God calls wicked, evil devices. Jealousy is like a grave, and love is like a garden. 

“Father, we ask You, Lord, clean our hearts. I give You my heart. I do not want my heart. I don’t want to be the lord of my heart. I don't want to be the leader of my heart. I don't want to be led by my heart. I want to be led by Your heart and Your ways. I don't want to exalt my ways above Your ways.” My righteousness is filthy rags no matter how righteous I am (Isaiah 64:6). If I am the most righteous man on this Earth or the most righteous preacher, my righteousness is still dirty rags. Admitting this is how I keep my heart clean. How did Paul keep his heart clean? Knowing his righteousness was as dirty rags. Do not exalt our ways above His ways. Anyone who exalts himself above the Word of God is deceiving himself, but God is faithful and just. 

“Father, we thank You, Lord. Because you are the Lord of our hearts. You are the keeper. Lead me not into temptation but deliver me. You have all the power and all the glory. Father, I thank You. Keep my heart clean. Keep my mind on You, O God. Keep me out of the witchcraft, the arrows, the thoughts, and all the accusations of the accuser of the brethren. Let me not even be used by the enemy thinking it is You, like so many self-righteous ones are doing! When we come out of Your covering, O God, we leave behind Your Word. When we exalt ourselves above You, we leave You. You are the Word, and the Word became flesh, and the Word dwelt among us, and the Word now is inside of our hearts. When we exalt our heart above Your Word, we begin to write our own gospel. 

Father, I give you my heart to be a tablet for Your word. Father, You said that you would take the stony heart and give me a heart of flesh. A new heart. This commandment I give to you, ‘to love God with all your heart, with all that is within you.’ Father, take all the idolatry. The idolatry of self. The idolatry of what I think should be. The idolatry of my own righteousness. The idolatry of wrong thinking. The idolatry of receiving the wrong words, from the devil, from believing and coming in negative agreement in lies.” There are no lies in love. Love does not lie. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was love. And the Word and love came and showed us the way. He showed us the way, and when we know the way, we have no more excuses because there is no more sacrifice. Now it is all about obedience. It is all about just start doing the right thing according to the Word of God. Then the power is right there. 

“Father, help us. Help us to walk in Your paths of righteousness. You are the way, the truth, and the life.” I am not the way. They and I are not the way!  We are not the way! You (reading this) are not the way. And I am not going to find a cherry picker to let me have my way. These perverted grace gospels are the only people who bring Jezebel spirits in when God is speaking to hearts. They are so deceived. They come out of the cross, and they have exalted their favorite scriptures above the Spirit of God. Father, let us not exalt our favorite scriptures above Your Spirit. Your Spirit is truth and life. Father, we humble ourselves under Your Spirit. Holy Spirit, we trust You. We lean not on our own understanding. We acknowledge You in all our ways, Father, even when You are silent and even when we are in a test. It may even be better for me not to do anything than do the wrong thing. 

Let us be vessels. Father. We are Your vessels. Send me. Thank You, Father. I give You my whole heart. Thank You, Father. When You gave me that vision of all my flesh being ripped off me, You told me if I give you all my heart, then I will be happy. The idolatry of trying to find happiness outside of our submitted hearts won’t work. It’s impossible. Those are broken cisterns that always run dry. Those things will never satisfy, but we continue thirsting for them anyway, and we are never happy or content.“ The servant is not greater than His master (John 13:16). If Jesus, who is our master, is also the greatest servant of all, what more of a servant should you be? To be the greatest in the kingdom is to be the servant of all. To be the greatest vessel in the kingdom is to be the greatest servant. 

“Father, Your ways are higher than our ways. There is nothing that You do not know. There is nothing anybody can do that you don’t know. Tomorrow has already been seen by You. If I walk into a ditch tomorrow, today You always know where I am going tomorrow. I can't get mad at You tomorrow because today You are trying to tell me about the ditch that is coming tomorrow.” But I want to do things my own way, and then we fall into the ditch. Fall in the poop. We get mad at God for that, but He is like, “I was telling you, don't do it. Don't do that.” He has given us the mind of Christ. Jesus Christ had such a submitted mind. Even when He wanted to do or not do God’s will, being fully man, He submitted His mind. He didn't even want to do anything at the wedding, but He submitted His mind with a simple prayer, “Not my will but Yours be done.” Jesus was not even paying attention to the flesh of man, and then He submitted His mind. He always submitted. My submission is my worship. When raising Lazarus, Jesus Christ submitted to God. In the garden, when He was sweating large drops of blood profusely, He submitted. It is all about God and man, and man and God. And then, when you're at this place of submission - everything works right. He always submitted what wanted to what He saw in heaven, to what He saw His father doing. Now we have the same opportunity with the Holy Spirit. 

Don't worry about what God is telling someone else to do; worry about what God is telling you to do. That’s how we work out our own salvation. What you do is for you to be accountable. I am accountable to do what God tells me to do. That’s it. Do not say: “Why do they have to do that?” It doesn't matter, God is God. Don’t say, “Why does he have to not work, and why this other doesn't have to have a job?” Who cares? Are you doing what God is telling you to do? 

Once you are faithful in the little, He will give you the desires of your heart. When you always complain, you are never going to get the freedom of having the choice to do it or not to do it. That is what happened between Cain and Abel. Cain was always looking over there,  at Abel. “How come… he…?, He thought. Just do what you're supposed to do. The heart of Cain got mad because he was worried about what his brother was doing or not doing. He wanted the job that was assigned to Abel. That's the problem: looking over and trying to be like your brother or trying to have what he or she has. That is called covetousness, and it is not popular in God’s heart. Thoughts like: “How come he always gets to go to the nations? I never do.” Because of thoughts like these, we cannot even see the goodness of God. Our heart is deceitful. Everything dries up, and we will not even know the goodness of God. We become blind and apathetic to all He has and has done in us.  

Everybody wants to have steps to do given to them or what kind of prayers to pray. When it is all about obedience, nothing else. Like He said in Jeremiah 17:5-7 “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.” (verse 7)…”Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. “ (verse 5) …“For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.” (verse 6) No living water. Only parched places. I was dying when I departed from God and started trusting in my own self. 

“They shall not see the good that cometh.”… Trust in the Lord. Trusting in the Lord with everything. If we don’t do that, we get to a very hard place because then we are being tossed to and fro by everything that irks us. I don't let people bother me anymore. People are in different places. I am not just talking about in the church or church family but your family or at work. You can be in a place where nothing bothers you; that means it won't affect you. It's not like you don't know what's going on, but it's not getting into your heart. You can be in a place where the Lord protects your heart, and you don't even have to. That is the place where Paul lived. Proverbs 3:5-6…Trusting in the Lord with all our heart. Many trust in themselves; in their flesh, in the world, in doctors, in counselors, trusting in other things. But Proverbs says trust in the Lord with ALL thy heart. 

Some of us trust half our heart. They think in their hearts, “I trust God about this much. I trust God for that situation. I trust God with finances.” Some struggle in that area of trusting with ALL. With “ALL THEIR HEART” has the same weight as I trust in the Lord with “EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE”. Because our heart is everything. If you are trusting with half of your heart, then you are trusting in half the things. Lean not on your own thinking, on your own understanding. Always acknowledge Him. It doesn't mean just to know He is God. Acknowledge Him. Look to Him. Let Him guide you, and He will direct your path. That is promised. But when we stop trusting Him, we start directing our own path. Then we must go through all this to get back on the path when we don't have to leave the path, ever. When He has all your heart, He has all your steps, all the time. Without God, the heart is deceitfully wicked. I don't care what a good person you are. God will even show you a man’s heart to protect you. But when you hold it against man, He will show you less and less of somebody else because He can’t trust you. So, the more He can trust you, the more He shows you, and the more you become like Christ because He knew all things. 

He said we should know all things (John 16:13), and all things mean all things. Religion says God knows everything, and we are just dirt; No, we know all things because of the Spirit of Truth. He calls us divine partakers of His glory (2 Peter 1:4). He calls us co-heirs (Romans 8:17). He calls us a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). He calls us holy (1 Peter 1:15). He calls us temples (1 Corinthians 3:16-17). Him: the gifts are Him. The Holy Spirit will reveal all things, or He will start to hide things. It's not that He doesn't love you, but He can’t trust you. He is not going to give you something if you are going to struggle with it. If He starts giving you gifts, and you start struggling with them, then He is going to stop doing it. If you hear the Lord, and you speak His words, and then add to it, then He will stop speaking to you. If you are a seer, and then you see things, but you speak and do things not out of the Spirit and you do it in your flesh, He is going to stop showing you things.

Just like the anointing. If you stop using the anointing, He is just going to stop pouring out the oil. It's not that He doesn't love you, but He doesn't want to give you something that will hurt you. So, when your heart is good, you get more of Him. Jesus had a good heart. He wasn't a pushover or a fake. He was real. People were talking about Him and saying, “This guy was mean.” They were all talking about Him. He was right; they were wrong. Judas was wrong. The Pharisees were wrong; Jesus was right. Jesus would not reveal all things just because He knew all, but He submitted to the Father, and when He did it, things were spoken at the right time. You can get a word from God, but you still must be submissive to the Spirit that gave you that Word. For example, I have had a word for a month and waited months to give the Word. Why? Because it doesn't mean that if God gives it to you right then that you must release it. Those words may be under the unction or a flow. But you need to know that the spirits of prophets are subjected to the prophet (1 Corinthians 14:32). The prophet is subject to the prophet. My spirit is not subject to me for me to go in with the Word I received full force. I wait on Him. The unction to function always comes with oil. 

Jesus had the Word, maybe how long? He didn't rush. He waited. He heard. Then He spoke, and then He confounded (1 Corinthians 1:27). If you wait on God, you will confound the wise and will be a blessing. See, you can be totally right and totally wrong when you speak Truth but outside the Spirit. Some of the written Word of God is not even the Truth if it does not carry the Spirit of Truth in them (the breath of God). It's like quoting a scripture over someone's life, but it's not the Truth for them at the right time. Every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God: that is the Truth (Matthew 4:4). Not only the written Word. Jesus is the Word. He was every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. 

“So, we pray, Lord, that only Your words proceed out of our mouth.” Jesus never said anything and then later had to say, “Let me take those words back.” We do it all the time. Jesus never had to ever take any of His words back. He was the Word, every Word spoken out of the mouth of God, and this is who He wants to make us. His words never fall to the ground. Samuel's words did not fall to the ground (1 Samuel 3:19) because Samuel only said what God told him to say. We have that same mandate as sons and daughters.  Sometimes, God shows us a part, and sometimes we need to be waiting to get the other part from somebody else. Like someone will have a dream, and I’ll get 80% of it, and then that one part of the dream puts everything together for the full counsel of it. Lots of people want to get prophetic dreams but suffer with them. They keep it to themselves. No, get the dream and share it. Oh, that goes with submission (Ephesians 5:21). Submitting one to another, that is how the gifts work. Submitting one to another, then all will judge the dream you had. But this does not happen all the time. Sometimes you get it all. But it has never a pattern or formula. It is by His Spirit always.  We need to submit ourselves unto Him that we might be living water. So, no matter what it is, if it is proceeding, it is alive. If it's premature, it's still not alive. It's in the birthing process. It is still in the womb of the Spirit. The womb of the Spirit means you know there is a Word, but you are holding it until it is birthed. That is when we become mature in the things of God. 

“Father, we thank You because You want us to be Your vessels. We submit our minds, our will, and our emotions because if we react upon our emotions, that is submitting out of our flesh, too.” You can see Him all throughout the day in every situation. Even hearing a song; why am I hearing that song now? Oh, because God is speaking!“ Just as a vessel, we must be sent in order to live, to be, and to breathe. We must move only when God tells us to. We have this religious mindset that being sent is going to nations or preaching on the stage. No…” God, send me to my sister, send me to my brother, send me to my mother.” It's like taking two steps forward can mean to be sent. “Get rid of religion in us, Father.” Some people cry out, “O God, send me to the nations,” but they won't even go to their neighbor.

“God, I want to be sent! God, send me to prayer! Send me to rest! Send me to wake up! Send me… When you send me, I am at peace. When you send me, Lord, I am at peace. When I send myself, I begin to strive. O Father, send me to this new heart of Yours, so I can give up mine! Amen!” 

Shane W Roessiger