Drawing Near - with a Pure and Clean Heart!

To be effective intercessors for God, this is a necessary principle, for the condition of our hearts can be a barrier between us and God!  Key scripture for this chapter, "Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hears sprinkled to cleanse us frm a guilty conscience and having our bodes washed with pure water."  Hebrews 10:22

God desires us to draw near with pure and clean hearts and the author uses two great word-pictures to demonstrate how our hearts are purified and cleansed.  First, she compares our hearts to silver and as silver is purified by heat and chemicals to remove the impurities, God's Refining Fire enters our hearts and begins its work.  God uses many things such as adverse circumstances, trials of many kinds and even people He brings into our lives for just such a purpose.  He is not only exposing those things that we would rather keep hidden in the back closets of our hearts but wants to remove them!

The second picture she uses is to show how Jesus' cleansing life-blood is working within us to cleanse us.  Just as our physical blood today works to cleanse us from impurities in our physical bodies, just so does His Life-blood work to cleanse our hearts!   The Old Testament practice of sprinkling blood at the Altar once a year to cleanse the people, atone, for their sins...Christ's blood once for all now is working in us to cleanse us of our sins.

The key to all this is that we cannot create this clean and pure heart for ourselves.  This is God's work in us.  But you know us...our first thoughts are ..what do I need to do?  That gets us in trouble everytime..because what God asks of us is to be yielded, surrendered..to give ourselves away to Him!  As you come to him in prayer and confession, look not inward at yourself and what you can do to fix yourself but look upward to Him.  Accept your weakness and inability to change yourself and let God do His work.  As Paul reflects in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10: "But He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me.  This is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficultieis.  For when I am weak, then I am strong."

Is God at work refining you right now?  Have you surrendered yourself to that process?  Will you stop resisting God's refining work and give Him complete access to your life?