Learning How to Live From a Whole Heart

Learning How to Live From a Whole Heart

Christa Black

How, practically, do we get whole?

It is your inheritance to have a whole heart.

As a leader, it is not your responsibility to just deal with the actions of those you are leading. Your responsibility is to shepherd their heart - the actions will follow.

You don’t just carry trauma or pain in your head, you carry it in your heart. We have a great memory. When you got saved, you probably didn’t step into total freedom and a whole heart, because you have a great memory and pain comes back up.

You can only give away what you have received so if you enter ministry wounded, at some point, you will replicate that. If you are seeking to be loved, you will give away love.

The condition of your heart determines the conditions of your life.

Isaiah 61 and Luke 4 - The primary purpose of Jesus is to bind up your broken heart, and proclaim freedom for the captives. Jesus already dealt with your sin nature.

Hiding stuff means it never gets healed. And any time you cannot get to a joyful connection with God and others, that is a signal that you have brokenness in your heart.

Do a heart check. Don’t go soul-searching without Holy Spirit, otherwise, you’re probably going to go into shame. Holy Spirit will point to what’s missing inside of you in your experience with Him. He will point to the site of His next miracle.

The heart is mentioned in scripture 841 times. The Heart: - loves - Matt 22:37
- trusts - Prov 3,5, & 6
- thinks - Prov 23:7
- speaks - Luke 6:45
- believes - Romans 10:9

Sometimes we don’t know what’s going on in our heart. Check it and see where the Holy Spirit wants to go to work. It’s your inheritance to live form a whole heart.

There is a good kind of hardening your heart. God commands us to guard our hearts, and sometimes this requires a type of hardening. Your heart is made up of 3 parts: - Emotional Identity
- Functional Identity
- Guardian Identity

We often guard the pain away so that we can continue to function. The problem is, you weren’t meant to guard pain for the rest of your life, otherwise, you’re going to get really tired.

Self-hatred is killing the church. The enemy doesn’t even have to attack us anymore, we do a good enough job of it ourselves.

Christa uses herself as an example of the guarding of the heart through her abuse and needing to still be able to function as a little girl. So you guard the pain in order to function. But because she didn’t know to have it healed by the Healer, it wore her down. Later in life, it would occasionally leak into her functional heart - this is where binging (her eating disorder) came from. This is also where her performance drive came from. And then she started hating the emotions that came with it.

But God never intended for you to guard your pain from your function or vice versa, He intended all of it to be brought to the Healer. The pure in heart see God. Pain is inevitable in this life, but misery is entirely optional. Pain is not your enemy. What you do with your pain becomes your enemy.

How do we bring it to Him? You are the only one that can invite Jesus into your pain. You can go through anything in this life, as long as your pain is brought to the Healer. Guard your intimacy with Him.

Christa closes in prayer with students.