Calibrating Your Heart
(The following is an excerpt from my book Take Heed, Watch & Pray. To be released in May 2024.)
Jesus said the greatest challenge to Christians in this generation is not the external circumstances that are happening around us. It has everything to do with our inner lives, the preparation of our hearts within us. We can’t always control what is happening externally, but we do have control over what happens to us internally, meaning over our hearts and how we keep them. Proverbs 4:23 (NKJV) says, “Keep [guard] your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” In a manner of speaking, this is what Jesus meant when He said, “Stay awake, take heed, watch and pray” (see Mark 32–33 NKJV).
What did Jesus mean by telling us to stay awake? He wasn’t necessarily talking about physically staying awake. He was referring to spiritual slumber that can overtake the lives of His most sincere and devout believers. Well acquainted with our humanity, Jesus knew that, as our environment grows darker, we tend to grow sleepier. It happens in both the natural and spiritual realms. If we aren’t intentional about calibrating our hearts to the Kingdom of God, when darkness grows darker, we can succumb to spiritual slumber. I like to compare it to the effect daylight hours have on us Michiganders.
At the beginning of December, the sun goes down a little after 5:00 p.m. in Michigan’s Eastern Time Zone. We have under nine and a half hours of daylight in early December. That leaves us with about fourteen and a half hours of darkness. Between the effects of the cold winter and the earlier sunsetting, many of us go to work when it is dark, we get out of work in the dark, and then we are ready to go home and get in our pajamas because it has been dark a long time. We ask ourselves, How much longer do I have to stay awake? Not sure if I can, but if I go to bed this early, I’ll be up at two-dark-thirty.
By the time summer rolls around in July, however, we’re getting three to four hours more of daylight, that many less hours of darkness, and we’re enjoying warm temperatures. I mean, we’re out in our backyards, grilling burgers and feeling wide awake as we try to squeeze in more life outside after 8:00 p.m. before it is too dark. We get tired later in the summer because it doesn’t get dark until later.
Daylight vs. Darkness
According to Jesus, the end-time generation (the Omega Generation) will see the end-time signs and evil proliferate in ways that we would have never imagined. And the lines between those who love God and believe in His Word and those who love wickedness and call what’s right wrong and what’s wrong right will become more clearly delineated. A day is coming when it will be like Isaiah 60:2 (KJV) foretold, “For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people.” And what will happen to our souls as the darkness around us begins to get darker, quicker, sooner, and more intense is our spirits will come under the influence of a spirit of slumber, resulting in spiritual sleep and lethargy if we don’t do something about it. Thankfully, Jesus gave us the secret strategy to fight spiritual slumber: “Take heed, watch and pray.” These three tactics will help calibrate our hearts to the time zone of heaven, the Kingdom of God. And calibrating our hearts to the Kingdom of God will keep us from coming under the sway of the spirit of the age and its increasing darkness.
Listen, we aren’t in control of a lot of things, but we are in control of what happens in our own hearts. Nobody else is responsible for our hearts. They are ours to govern. We can submit our hearts to Jesus and His Kingdom, or we can submit our hearts by default to the spirit of this age. Because right now on the earth, there are two things that are at work: the Spirit of God and the spirit of this age.
The spirit of the age is a spirit of darkness. It is a spirit of heaviness or weightiness. Sin and evil, for instance, often produce an oppressive weight or heaviness on us. Sin is burden, weight, or yoke. It can produce not only oppression, but depression in our lives, which can produce anxiety and fear.
The Spirit of God, however, is light. He’s truth. He’s revelation. He brings us into encounter with the Lord. He brings freedom to our hearts. The second half of Isaiah 60:2 says that, right during the gross darkness, “the Lord will arise upon [us], and his glory will be seen upon [us].” That’s the light of God shining on us!
In God’s economy, darkness is not the end. It is just the beginning. If we look back to Genesis 1:2 (ESV), we read, “Darkness was over the face of the deep.” But what is the first thing we read after that? God began His six days of creation. Verse 3 tells us the first thing He created was light. So, when God created everything, He called light out of darkness. He still calls light out of darkness. Darkness is simply a setup for what God is going to do in these last days, which is to show forth His glory through His Church and people as we arise and shine. That’s what we see promised in Isaiah 60:2.
Additionally, the book of Romans says that the Kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy (see Romans 14:17 ESV). Do you know that you can have righteousness, peace, and joy in your life every single day regardless of how dark the world is becoming? It is because the Kingdom of God is within you. And you can submit yourself to the Kingdom of God. You can do what Jesus said in Matthew 6:34 (ESV) when He said, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.”
Earlier in the same chapter, Jesus said not to worry about what you’re going to wear or what you’re going to eat (see Matthew 6:24 ESV). Don’t worry. Don’t be anxious about anything. All the world—the ethnos, the Gentiles, the nations, the spirit of this world—is affected by worry and anxiety connected to tomorrow, but you are not called to live like the world. You were not called to live in sync with the world’s time zone, where its darkness is psyching you out to think it is time to sleep. You are called to wakefulness—to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things [the things that you need] will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33 ESV). You need to align and calibrate your heart to the Kingdom of God, to the light of God, even though you are living in a grossly dark world.
