Your Heart is a Room

Your heart is a room

You’ve probably heard your heart described as a room. There are all the analogies about Jesus knocking at our hearts, closing our hearts, etc. so the room analogy is familiar. But I want you to think about the room of your heart like an interrogation room. You’ve all seen some kind of cop show or something? Where they interrogate people in rooms with two- way mirrors? That’s like the room of your heart. And just like any room in the middle of a building, the resting state of your heart is dark – because that’s the nature of original sin – we are cut off from God’s light so our heart is a dark room. So there’s a door to this room.  And you control whether it’s open do not. Jesus is the one knocking at the door. And it’s the person of Christ blanketed in light like at the Transfiguration – so he is just completely made of light. And you crack the door – a little light comes in. You open the door – more comes in. But you let him all the way into the room and it’s so bright it’s incredible. But there is one thing that’s different about this room versus the kind of interrogation rooms you see on TV. In this room, you also control how much light gets through the mirror. Normally with a two way mirror, whichever side is lighted is the side you can see, but an effect of the fall is that now our mirror has this coating we have to chip away at. Because it’s the world outside that room, and goodness knows it’s dark. But though the light inside your heart might be blinding, it is masked by how much of it you let through. Christ can use us as candles, flashlights, searchlights, even beacons if we work at scraping off that coating of selfishness, sin, hate, apathy, and just let Him be the one people see when they see us. That’s what people don’t expect. People never expect Christ. They didn’t expect him the first time, they don’t expect him now, but yet he comes. And today he comes in us. You are literally the hands and feet of Jesus. We say and it’s like okay, sure, cool, whatever. But literally Jesus has NO hands and feet in this world except yours and mine. He entrusts this world to us, not because he's a hands-off God who just lets us do as we will, but because he has made himself available to us through the Holy Spirit, and that's a HUGE part of how he works in the world. So what does that mean? That means in keeping that coating on our mirror, in staying self-conscious of our faith, staying selfish, staying in sin, we are personally keeping Christ from breaking into our world and the world of those around us the way that he could. Now this doesn’t mean God doesn’t find some extraordinary ways to work in the world even if that coating is on there nice and tight. God will work with anything we give him. So what are you giving God to work with today? How can you chip away at the things that make it hard for Christ to shine through you?