Your heart is like a football-shaped rubber squeeze coin purse. If you won’t work to continually hold it open to God and to other people, it will suddenly snap shut.

Much that is called Christianity is merely human effort and programming. It requires nothing supernatural because it is set up, organized, and run by human ability and hard religious work. However, when you read the New Testament, you discover a faith-based Christianity that relied on actual demonstrations of the presence and power of the risen Jesus, not on the human striving.

When Jesus said to seek first the kingdom of God, He wasn’t referring to using religious effort to accomplish things for God. No amount of human good works can enable a person to come under and be a part of God’s government (kingdom). The Scriptures clearly state that people are saved by faith and not by the works of their human effort.

John the Baptist explained it like this: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” How is that done? By doing everything we can to hold our heart open to God and to other people and to continually make plenty of room for Christ in us to do His work (not ours) within us and through us.

No matter how hard you work and/or how religious you are, if you don’t intentionally hold your heart open you won’t be able to experience the kingdom of God. Therefore, instead of working to accomplish things for God, the key to New Testament Christianity is to begin to faith-rest from your own attempts to be religiously productive, to continually hold your heart open to God, and to empty it of everything that resists God’s will so that He can have full access to do His work in and through you.

In a culture dominated by human effort to meet their own desires, people who seek to let their heart be ruled by Christ will brightly shine. Jesus first!

“Try less. Trust more.” God recently spoke those words in my heart. Now I’m discovering that the only way I can truly trust God is to focus intently on keeping my heart open and on letting Him freely work in me unrestricted by my desires and effort.