Learn By Heart

UV 3340/10000 Learn By Heart

Remember these things, Jacob, for you, Israel, are my servant. I have made you, you are my servant; Israel, I will not forget you.

Isaiah 44 v 21

When we make an effort to remember our follies and meditate on God’s word, our struggles with our own nature and with God will cease. When we so remember, the positive patterns of our lives will get established in our hearts and minds and the negative patterns will be erased. As teachers in primary schools used to repeatedly tell us, “Learn by heart.” We will have victory over our impulses and passions that drive us to error and failures. We have been made with the purpose to serve God. We should deem it the highest privilege to serve God for He is a great, kind, loving, forgiving, noble Master. As servants of Almighty God, if we remember His word and apply it constantly and faithfully in our lives, the Lord will also remember us. If we take Him and His word for granted, He too would take us for granted or ignore us.

We should not rely on our own limited experience, knowledge, understanding and wisdom but lean on the Lord heavily and learn from the Word and the continuing life coaching by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit manifested as a dove over Jesus when God was most pleased that Jesus had remembered His word and obeyed the water of baptism at the hands of a servant of God, John the Baptist. The reason for such spiritual symbolism is that Jesus yearned that His followers eagerly learn two of His personal qualities and practice it constantly- humility and gentleness. The dove symbolizes both these qualities of Jesus- humility and gentleness.

We should therefore, not learn by head or by rote but “by heart” the Word of God. WE learn by heart by remembering and practicing the precepts and principles of Jesus. When we do, we get the wages of a servant of God- namely, the blessings of the Tri-Une God. The Lord commits in the uni-verse never to forget or forsake or leave us. The presence of the Lord will be with us, invisible but palpable. We can continually touch Him not just the hem of His robe as the woman with bleeding did and He will continually touch our hearts and make us whole, healing us of the many hurts, remembered and not remembered by us.