Rend Your Heart February 25, 2009, Wednesday
Posted by Kyle Black in Bible Study.trackback
Yesterday I was reading Joel 2:12-13
12 “Yet even now,” declares the LORD,
“return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
13 and rend your hearts and not your garments.”
Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love;
and he relents over disaster.”
After reading this I realized that I had always been looking at verse 13 the wrong way. I had never taken the time to look up the definition of REND. After talking to Lindsay about it she looked it up and we found that it means to tear, split , or separate. To see the definition go here. This led us to ponder what exactly ” rend your heart” actually meant.
I personally think that God is telling us that we need to come to Him torn on the inside. He wants us to not just tear our clothes (as they did in biblical times see Esther 4:1 for example), but to be torn on the inside also. God’s is telling us that He desires our heart instead of our garments. I love this verse in a new way now… especially when it is read with verse 12 “return to me with all your heart”. Think about it! God is telling us to return to Him with all are heart, but not just with the normal condition of your heart. He wants us to rend our whole heart. He wants us to come to Him broken, torn, and split so He can restore us as only He can.
So what does “rend your heart” mean to you?
Rending my heart to me means to give out all I am to God and allowing Him to empty me so that He can fill me and use me for His own glory. He is the only one who knows what He predestined me to be and therefore what He has deposited in me. It is to allow God to let the deposits in my life be made manifest for His pleasure.
It means genuine sentiment is more valuable than simply going through the motions.
So rend your heart and not your garments
Joel 2: 12-13 “Now therefore”, says the Lord, “Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping, and with mourning.” So rend your heart and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, For He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.
I spent most of my life living with a heart that was closed down and did my utmost to feel very little. Almost five years ago my Daddy called me to begin a journey with Him to bring me back to life again.
During this time He has repeatedly called me to “rend my heart”; to “tear my heart asunder”. At first it was overwhelming but at least when the feelings came and the tears rained down I knew Iwas alive. When I allowed my heart to feel I knew I was no longer a member of the “living dead” that I saw walking all around me doing everything they could to numb out and hide from their pain.
My Daddy saying it is time to stop and open our hearts to Him; allowing Him access to the innermost parts of our being. Only then can we, as His people, truly be able to see and understand those in pain around us.
If we are walking around repressed how can we be used to reach out to those who are oppressed; to those who are desperately looking for a soft place to land; to feel again, to fall apart?
My Daddy says that we are to be the soft place individually and together as His church; the living and resurrected body of His Son, Jesus Christ. So let us “rend our hearts” so they can be emptied of all that we no longer need, all that we allowed the world to put there and allow our Lord to fill us up so we can be poured out to a lost and thirsty world.
Let us “tear our hearts asunder” so we can be the soft, safe and sweet place where the hurting, the broken and the lost can come and fall apart knowing we are there to love them; to protect them and lift them up to their Savior.
Amen
“The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust possible: “The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.”
The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive. And for now this is the only victory possible.”
(Chris Hedges, a staff member of the New York Times since 1990, has been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. An adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, he is the author of Losing Moses on the Freeway and What Every Person Should Know About War. Chris was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the New York Times’s coverage of global terrorism. A senior fellow at the Nation Institute, he lives in New Jersey. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.)
hi!! You don’t know me, but My name is Linnea,I’m just a girl who loves the Lord so much, and as I was spending some time with the Him, searching out what “rend my heart” really meant on a google search-your blog came up…and i knew i had to read it. I was listening to the song “rend” by jimmy needham…and i broke out in tears. The Lord’s really teaching me about seeking Him with all my heart, and losing myself in His love- that’s the only place my true identity will be found… and this song shattered my heart all over again to really come to the Lord in brokeness-longing for HIm to fill me up over and over again! He just told me how much He wants ALL of my heart! … plus- He’s also starting a new thing in my life with the story of Esther. I really have had this craving to learn more about her life- and as you mentioned a verse from her story I couldn’t help but reading on more. So thank you for sharing you and your wife’s heart and thoughts…it just effected a girl in Australia about a year later! God is so good and all powerful! :) thanks again! Numbers 6:24-26
I did too… It was so cool to learn someting new from God. I’m glad you’re hearing from and responding to God.
Dude i always thought that rend meant something entirely diffrent from that meaning, and this new meaning has opened doors i didn’t even knew exsisted. now i realize just how much God wants us to want him and its awesome.
I was just praying yesterday and expressing to the Lord that I want to tear my heart from outside distraction and come before Him undone…unraveled. I am starting a 40 day prayer journey today and so appreciated this being my verse of the day! Thank you! It reminded me and focused my thoughts on the position that I long to be in as I pray for my family, friends, neighbors, etc. over this 40 days. One thing I learned recently through a study of Esther is how “good” God’s people were at expressing their need for the Lord in the story of Esther. I can’t imagine tearing my clothes, laying in dirt, and wailing all in view of the public…as Mordecai did. But I agree with you that their outward expression shows us what God wants to happen inwardly. One of my favorite songs right now says: “Break my heart for what breaks yours…” I am longing over the next 40 days to be intensely interceding for my community…that all would know Him.