Subtitle: How to keep your heart warm

Excerpt: The article discusses the dangers of a hardened heart, particularly towards God, and how it can lead to a morally corrupt mind. It offers suggestions for softening a hardened heart, including prayer, repentance, Bible study, gratitude, forgiveness, and surrounding oneself with supportive believers.

Author: Debra Hodges

Is the state of the world getting to you? Do you feel like you must harden your heart to protect yourself? I know I’ve been feeling that way lately. Who is your heart hardened against? Is it God, the Devil, or other people?

A hardened heart toward God can be caused by pride, arrogance, and stubbornness. It is a person’s persistent, willful rejection of divine truth, characterized by falling prey to the deceitfulness of sin. It is characterized by disbelief, disobedience, unforgiveness, materialism, and apathy. People who harden their hearts against God eventually diminish their spiritual sensitivity, making them resistant to conviction and, ultimately, to God’s grace. By constantly ignoring God’s sovereignty and neglecting His Word, people blind themselves to the truth of God’s love for them and His willingness to forgive them.

A reprobate mind is a depraved mind. It is a mind that is perverted and has succumbed to the devil’s lies, so it is unable to detect truth any longer. When God gives someone over to this state, it means He has fully withdrawn His help, allowing that person to fully experience the consequences of their rejection of Him.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient. (Romans 1:28)

People don’t realize how dangerous it is to continually resist the Holy Spirit’s promptings. Failing to read, listen to, and apply Biblical truth doesn’t make it untrue. The Bible repeatedly warns people that constant unbelief and unrepentance lead to irreversible consequences. A prime example of this is seen in the account of Exodus, where God sealed the Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness. It is also seen in the following scripture.

A sign that someone’s mind is in this reprobate state is when they try to lead others to embrace sinful practices. Spiritual blindness, alienation and separation from God, accumulating His wrath, and an inability to enter His rest are consequences of this mindset. 

Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. (Ephesians 4:18)

If you feel your heart hardening, please consider the following suggestions on how you can soften it.

1. Realize that you can’t change your own heart by your own willpower. Pray and ask God to soften your heart and give you a heart of flesh.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. (Ezekiel 36:26)

2. Turn away from the practices that hardened your heart and turn back to God with humility. This will lead to a time of refreshing in your life.

Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. (Acts 3:19)

3. Regularly read the Bible and allow Scripture to “judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

4. Remember God’s faithfulness by reliving past times of God’s kindness and provision for you. Practice gratitude by listing the positives in your life.

5. Release any bitterness you have in your heart toward people through forgiveness. This means you must stop punishing the people who hurt you. You should let them off your hook and realize they remain on God’s hook.

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. (Romans 12:19)

6. Surround yourself with fellow believers who can encourage you daily. Keep yourself accountable to them so you don’t fall prey to Satan’s tactics.

7. Try to practice humility since pride is a major contributor to the hardness of heart. Pray for God to reveal areas of arrogance in your life and choose to yield your will to His.

Conclusion

If the reason you are resisting God’s tug on your heart is that you have been hurt by Christians, I urge you not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by saying you don’t want anything to do with God. God didn’t want those people to hurt you, and He wants you to return to Him and let Him heal you. If the reason you are resisting God is that you think you’re too far gone and beyond His forgiveness, I urge you to consider the account of how the Father forgave the prodigal son. Every day, we face a choice to pay attention to the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit or to harden our hearts in resistance. The latter choice means closing ourselves off to truth and allowing pride, fear, or past hurts to build walls between the lover of our souls and us.

God’s voice is always one of invitation, not condemnation. He constantly calls us because He loves us and wants us to fulfill His purpose for our lives. Even though believing and trusting God requires courage, the rewards infinitely outweigh the risks. We must realize that we, as finite human beings, don’t have all the answers. Keeping our hearts soft and receptive requires the willingness to remain open to correction and the readiness to change direction if necessary. God wants our hearts to remain soft, not to diminish us, but to lead us into the fullness of who we were created to be.

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