I love the way kids think. Don’t you? (Well, okay, maybe not all the time, but often.) They see things so much more simply than we adults do.
Case in point: one day, when Lindsey was about three and a half, she and I were playing together. She loved pretend play, where she could be an adult for a little while. That particular day, we were playing with the doctor’s bag filled with a doctor’s tools of the trade—a stethoscope, a thermometer, a blood pressure cuff, and so on. Lindsey was giving me a checkup.
Apparently, I was always pretty sick. Lindsey would stick the thermometer in my mouth, take it out, and turn it to the frowny face that said I had a temperature. “You’re vewy sick,” she would say seriously. She was also very good about performing all kinds of medical procedures and curing all kinds of maladies. She has a caring soul, and she wants to make sure everyone is okay.
“Do you want to be a doctor someday when you grow up?” I asked her.
Lindsey replied happily, “I already am a doctor, cuz I have doctor stuff.”
Of course, if it were that simple, we’d all be playing in golf tournaments and driving really nice cars. But there’s a lot more to becoming a doctor than having doctor “stuff”. We know that, and we therefore wouldn’t claim to be a doctor if we hadn’t gone through medical school.
But the not-so-funny thing is, we often claim to love Christ just because we have Christian “stuff” or do Christian things. We look to our church attendance, our six different Bible versions sitting on the shelf, or our Christian music CD’s, and we take them as evidence of our love for the Lord. But those things are not necessarily indicators of how much we love Him. They may result from our desire to draw close to Him. But it’s possible to have all those things and not really love Him very much, if at all.
In fact, Jesus condemned the Pharisees for having all the right religious “stuff” and at the same time having hearts that were far from God. You and I would do well to examine our hearts, too. We may do all the right things, but do we love Jesus? We may even abstain from all the wrong things, but do we love Him? We might look really good on the surface, and we might even think we’ve got this “Christian walk” thing all together, but are we “doing” Christianity, or loving Christ?
I know there have been times in my life when I was amazed to find I had been on the wrong track, or been missing something, when all along I sincerely thought I was getting it right. Perhaps you’ve had those times, too. That’s why we should regularly present ourselves before God and ask the Holy Spirit to examine our hearts and reveal to us anything that does not please Him.
Let’s be willing to do that this week. Let’s lay ourselves open before Him and ask the Great Physician to purify our hearts of anything that doesn’t belong there. Let’s make sure we truly love Christ with all our heart, and not just with the things we do or possess.
Ephesians 6:24—Grace to all who love our LORD Jesus Christ with an undying love.