Valentines Day

This day is meant to remind us of love and hearts joined together in friendship and commitment.  God desires to have a deep and satisfying personal relationship with us. 

God has shared His heart with us, invited us to share our hearts with Him, and generously expressed tenderness and kindness towards us. 

We’ve often been too busy with pursuing relationship with other human beings to give much attention to God’s offer of love and friendship.  As good as those relationships are for us, they will never give us what we need at the deepest places of our heart. 

Only God can meet us there and make us fully human – as he intended – so we can then live well in loving relationship with others. 

Many cards and gifts with hearts on them are exchanged with friends and loved ones today.  God is offering to us a beautiful heart – a healed and forgiven heart, a heart we desperately need to replace our broken and wounded hearts. 

I’ll pour pure water over you and scrub you clean. I’ll give you a new heart, put a new spirit in you. I’ll remove the stone heart from your body and replace it with a heart that’s God-willed, not self-willed. I’ll put my Spirit in you and make it possible for you to do what I tell you and live by my commands.

Ezekiel 36:25-27

Without God, our heart truly is as hard as stone.  It’s filled with revenge, with hateful anger, with resentment, with bitterness and self-righteous judging. It’s been scarred for too long by broken tapes of hatred and condemnation.  

There’s no “fixing” that stuff.  We actually have to hand over that dead and dried up heart and exchange it for one that is living and soft and real. 

Lord we want give You our hearts today.  Pour pure water on us and scrub us clean.  Give us that new heart and new spirit that we so desperately need. 

Remove the stone heart from us and replace it with a heart that wants Your will not our own, that follows Your commands rather than wandering off in destructive self-will. 

We need healing.  We need Your kind of love that looks beyond the frailties and failures of others and allows Your powerful love to overcome difficulties between us.  Help us today, God, to live as Your beloved sons and daughters and to share that love simply and consistently with others.  Amen

This Valentine’s Day let’s truly celebrate the lavish love God pours out on us and then in turn reach out to others and pour out this wonderful love from God to them.