Monthly Archives: January 2012

Is Your Heart a Highway to God?

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“Blessed are those whose strength is in you,

in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

They go from strength to strength;

each one appears before God in Zion.”

Psalm 84:5, 7 (ESV)

            How dependent we are on roads so we can go places we need to go. Highways facilitate our travel to our destination. Our hearts are highways that encourage others to follow us on our journey to the destination we pursue. Is your heart a highway to God? Does it encourage and direct people to God or does it point to some other destination?

 

What do the signposts associated with your heart say? What signals do people receive from you? Does your general approach to life and its challenges reflect the joy of the Lord or a sour grumpiness?

 

One of the first things we notice about people is their passion in life. When people spend a few hours with you will they see a passion for God and life in his will? Some have a dominant passion for sports, entertainment, or one’s work. For others it is family and friends.

 

Is your most dominant passion in life for God or for self? If your greatest interest and desire in life to honor God or is it to bring honor and pleasure for self? We must not let temporary and transient interests sidetrack us from our passion for God. Let your enthusiasm for God be infectious leading others to follow your highway to God.

 

Are you investing in temporary securities or in eternal investments? When people observe how you use your time, money, abilities, what do they conclude about the direction and destination of the highway of your heart?

 

Where are you going with your life? Does your spirit point people to or away from God? What is most important to me–self, money, sex, pleasure, power of some other false god. What your heart worships is your god.

 

Not long before my friend, Jim Taylor, moved from a preaching ministry in a western state, a couple of middle-aged people living together unmarried commented to Jim’s wife. They said, “We decided to become Christians after watching how your husband lived his life.” Being around Jim and watching his life convicted them that they were not living the way they should and they determined to get married. His heart was a highway to God.

 

Take an inventory of your heart. Is it a highway directing others to God?

 

John Adams’ Thoughts on Government, Religion, and Freedom

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 “And liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain has given them understandings and a desire to know.” ((The numbers document the page for the quote in John Adams by David McCullough, 2001. 60)

“Statesmen, my dear Sir, plan and speculate for Liberty but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom securely stand.” (Letter to Zabdiel Adams, June 21, 1776)

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  (Message to Massachusetts’ military officers, October 11, 1798)

“Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.”  (Article III of the Northwest Ordinance)

“The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. . . .”

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”  (70)

“. . . that form of government with virtue as its foundation was more likely than any other to promote the general happiness.” (102)

In his Thoughts on Government, he called for a “government of laws, and not of men.”

Advocating the principle of separation and balance of powers, he wrote in A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “. . . the legislative, executive and judicial power shall be placed in separate departments, to the end that it might be a government of laws, and not of men.” (223)

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