Get the Heart before the Horse

Love what is good and hate what is evil.

This has been my prayer for my children for many years. When life gets confusing...when too many opinions are given...when I don't know exactly what to pray for...this has been my simple prayer. 

We have vision and dreams for our kids. ideas of what we want them to "look like" or be doing as an adult. Activities we imagine them succeeding at, people we'd love them to be married to and lifestyles that would just make us so proud. I still have these dreams, and I still pray for them...but...the details reflect the heart and so the heart is what should be the core of our prayers.

The heart has always represented the "desires" of a person. All of our actions will flow from them and be a reflection of them. Trying to dot every i and cross every t is painstaking work and ridiculously unnecessary. We are instructed to "Be faithful in little and you'll be faithful in much" in Luke 16:10. Obviously true. We need to be concerned about all the little things we do so that the bigger things won't get derailed. God should be honored in every breath we take and every syllable we speak. That is my responsibility for myself...but can I manage that for 4 kids?! Absolutely not. I can barely manage my own behavior that closely. 

Managing behavior before managing the heart is backward. If I pray for and deal with the desires and motives of my kids' hearts, then God honoring behaviors will follow...naturally! Keeping my kids behavior in check all the time will never make them love Jesus and all of His good things. It also gets very tiring...trying to be good all of the time! And then there are those moments when we are weak and tempted...good behavior patterns aren't always enough to keep us from moral failure. But love is. It's the difference between a works salvation and a relationship salvation. If we adore Jesus and are convinced that His ways bring joy then those bad little things we do become easy to ignore, reject and even hate. Once we hate a pet sin, it is almost conquered.

I have seen the difference in trying to manage the behavior of my kids and watching the Holy Spirit transform their heart. Wow. All of my good mommy effort could never cause a heart to love what is good. When you see the power of the Spirit do this you will fall on your knees in awe, cry in gratefulness and plead for more. Invest your parenting effort in this prayer...it's something you can manage better and something you can never produce on your own. Give your own heart, soul, mind and strength to the Father and watch Him raise your kids for you.

Love what is good and hate what is evil.