Believe in Your Heart

Originally posted 5/8/20

How do I get to Heaven? What do I have to do to get into Heaven? These questions are asked everyday by people all over the world. All world religions have an answer to these questions. All religions have one thing in common: they answer these questions by saying you must do enough good deeds on earth to pay for your ticket to Heaven. The definition of good deeds vary by religion, but when you get to the root of their beliefs, you will find that you must do something to earn your way to Heaven. What makes Christianity different from all other religions? We don’t have to DO anything to enter into Heaven. We just need to believe in our hearts that Jesus is God and he paid the price for us to enter into Heaven. Romans 10:9-10 (ESV) says, “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” So what does it mean to believe in your heart? I’m glad you asked because my husband and I have been talking about that very statement all week. 

There is a difference between heart knowledge and head knowledge. Head knowledge is something you know to be true. You know that Jesus is God, that he died on a cross, and raised from the dead. Just as you know that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It is something that you were taught in school and you believe it to be true. You may have been taught who Jesus is. Your parents may have brought you to church as a child and you learned about all the miracles Jesus did. You know that what you were taught is true. You believe what your teachers and parents told you. 

Heart knowledge is different. There must come a point when the information you know to be true about Jesus enters into your heart. Your heart as an organ has an important job. It pumps the blood around your whole body. Your blood gets oxygen and nutrients and delivers them to every cell in your body, then exchanges the oxygen and nutrients for waste, like carbon dioxide. Without your heart pumping, you would die in a matter of minutes. When the knowledge of who Jesus is and what he did moves from your mind to your heart, it becomes a part of who you are. It takes over your whole body, much like what the blood that is currently pumping around your body is doing. More than just traveling around your body, this heart knowledge of who Jesus is and what he did for you changes the very essence of you. It’s like Jesus comes in and rewrites your DNA to add a J to the ACGT letter mixture. You see, when you believe with your heart that Jesus is God, that he did die for you, and he offers you the gift of salvation – the free ticket into Heaven – you are forever changed. You are no longer the same person you were when you simply had head knowledge. 

The best part is you don’t have to go searching for God. You don’t have to go to Heaven to find him and ask for his gift of salvation. Neither do you need to go find him among the dead to see if he really is the Messiah – the one who takes your sins away. He is as close to you as the words you speak and he is as much a part of you as your own heart that pumps your blood throughout your entire body. When you tell others that you trust fully in Jesus to save you and you believe it so much that it becomes who you are, you are not only made right with God, but he comes to live in you and changes who you are. (See Romans 10:6-8)

How do you know if your belief in Jesus is head or heart knowledge? The best way is to ask yourself this question: Is Jesus the lord of my life? Remember the verse says, “confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord.” This begs the question: what does it mean to make Jesus Lord of my life? I’m glad you asked! To make Jesus the lord of your life means you realize that you aren’t God, and you don’t know everything. You look to Jesus to not only guide you, but to take control of your whole life. You lay down your way of doing life to do life the way that Jesus directs, knowing that living that kind of life is actually living a real and abundant life. Telling Jesus to take control of your life is what allows him to enter into your life and change the DNA. The change in your DNA shows the world that you are in fact a child of God. 

The Bible says that even the demons know who Jesus is and tremble. Knowing who Jesus is and what he did is not what gives you salvation. Jesus needs to become a part of who you are, and that’s where the life change happens and the power is stored. Demons don’t really have any power. Yes, they have the ability to do powerful looking things, but really they only have as much power as you or I give them. Once we are tired of allowing them to do their damage, and we, filled with Jesus and his power, tell them to leave us alone, they have to obey. Because you, filled with the power of Jesus, have more power over the demons than they have over you. Sure, they want us to believe that they are big, bad, and scary, but that is a big fat lie. When our DNA changes and that J becomes part of us, we become powerful people who don’t have to put up with anything that doesn’t make us stronger. That J in our DNA makes us like the Hulk in the spiritual world. When the Hulk is around, nobody and no thing is safe from his destruction. Unlike the Hulk, we have the ability to control ourselves. We can choose to only destroy things that come from our enemy, and build up people who are not our enemy. 

I ask you now, do you believe that Jesus is God? Do you believe that he died on the cross so you can be forgiven of all your sins and be in right standing with God? Do you believe that because you say yes to the first two questions, you will enter into Heaven after you die? Now the most important question of all, does this knowledge change who you are? Can you say that what you believe has had a profound effect on you? Are you a totally different person now than before you believed all that about Jesus? If you can’t say a definite yes, I would encourage you to do two things. 1. Pray and ask God to show you what it means to have a heart knowledge about him. 2. Talk to someone you trust and know believes those things about Jesus with their heart. You can see how their faith in Jesus changes the way they look at life. 

Allowing Jesus to become a part of who I am is the best decision I have ever made. I pray that you will make the same decision. You will never regret it!