Calloused Hearts

March 31st, 2004 at 11:00 pm by sillyjoe (Life and Introspection, Religion)

GOD, your God, will cut away the thick callouses on your heart and your children’s hearts, freeing you to love GOD, your God, with your whole heart and soul and live, really live. — Deuteronomy 30:6 MSG

I’ve been reading Deuteronomy 30 over and over again.

I love how the Message translation puts the person of God as “GOD, your God.” First of all, he’s all caps GOD…the sovereign LORD, the almighty, the KING. But that’s not all…He’s YOUR God. He’s not just some impersonal deity, he’s THE personal God…YOUR personal God. He is in you, and you in Him.

This commandment that I’m commanding you today isn’t too much for you, it’s not out of your reach. It’s not on a high mountain–you don’t have to get mountaineers to climb the peak and bring it down to your level and explain it before you can live it. And it’s not across the ocean–you don’t have to send sailors out to get it, bring it back, and then explain it before you can live it. No. The word is right here and now–as near as the tongue in your mouth, as near as the heart in your chest. Just do it! — v. 11-14

I love these verses here. He’s telling us that what He’s giving us to do is doable. In fact, it’s right in reach. I love the way this is worded in the Message too.

Go here to read the whole chapter…I hope you are encouraged by it as I was.

4 Comments »

  1. Steven said,

    April 1st, 2004 at 1:59 pm

    I love the all caps as well..it goes back to the scribes’ tradition of not writing out the name YHWH or Yahweh because even God’s name is too holy to write or speak. Good post though Joe! Yo Joe! But really, God knows us, He is aware of our condition of the toughening of our souls, how we guard ourselves the way we do. I wonder, God calls us to guard our hearts, but I’m thinking that even this has to be done His way..by offering ourselves to Him (Phillipans 4). It seems that most of the time we guard our hearts our own way, thus creating a calloused heart…a heart that becomes hard and unwilling to serve or be vulnerable.

  2. SillyJoe said,

    April 1st, 2004 at 2:11 pm

    I actually was going to talk more about the calloused heart thing…but fo some reason I didn’t.

    That verse really applied to me and the way I lived my life for a long time. I was a callous-hearted “church-goer”, who went through all the motions and did all the “stuff”, but it never meant anything to me.

    I believe God cut away my callouses, just like the scripture says, a couple of years ago, and since then, I’ve “lived, really lived”

  3. MarkT said,

    April 1st, 2004 at 9:11 pm

    And I didn’t know that Bible Gateway had added the Message to its translations. I don’t own a copy yet, but Casella turned me on to it for reading chunks of the Bible at a time, when you’re not doing intensive study where NASB-type precision is better.

  4. SIllyJoe said,

    April 1st, 2004 at 9:22 pm

    I got a copy of the Message:Remix last summer….I’ve since had to duct tape the cover to keep it toegether…I use it quite often.

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URL

Post a Comment