Where is your heart?

I know, it's in the middle of your chest, but the question is actually much deeper then that. Where does your motivation come from? Your actions reflect your heart. Romans 2:17-29 hits those of faith right in the face. If YOUR heart is bragging about how great YOUR faith is, and how righteous YOU are, and how much YOU know about God, then YOUR heart is all about YOU. God wants our heart to be about HIM. How great HE is, and how awesome HE is, and how our faith is moved by HIM, and how great it is that you can know HIM. When your heart is motivated by how great you are in your faith, then your faith has nothing to do with Jesus. When your heart is motivated by how great He is, then your faith is about Jesus.

The more we focus on ourselves the less we focus on Jesus. Romans 2:17-24 Paul pretty much slaps those of faith right in the mouth. How can you say that you are great in your knowledge of God when you do not even practice what you claim to follow? The Jews knew everything there is to know about God, they were perfect in their faith. Or so they thought. Then Paul rips them a new one by pointing out that their focus has been on them and not Him. This is what makes faith so interesting, you have to balance it by not becoming focused on what you know, but what you do with that knowledge.

Like the Jews, the church gets into the rut of thinking that "we know everything to know about God and therefore our faith is great". I believe that this type of thinking is faulty because it assumes that you can obtain perfect faith. Our belief in Jesus does not mean that we know all there is to know. We know as much as we understand with our finite brains. Faith reaches beyond the limits of what we can understand in order to connect to a God that is infinite in nature. Can you understand infinity? The concept of knowing a God who by definition is beyond understanding is literally mind blowing. What Paul was saying to the Jews was that they believed that they were holy because they thought they understood God, but they did not even follow the God they claimed to know. How can you understand God if you don't follow Him? Perhaps the church needs to refocus its attention from understanding God to following God to the best of their understanding. Where is your heart? Mine is knowing that my faith is only as great as my serving.