I remember last year on my birthday, I received a prophetic word from the scripture verse Psalm 51:10 – Create in me a clean heart. She mentioned how in this season that God was giving me emotional healing as a gift if I was willing to receive it. Since that day, that is exactly what the Lord did and more.
Create in me a clean heart meaning
Like king David, my soul needed a deep cleaning- a clean slate. King David wanted not only God to purify his heart but to also give him a brand new heart. Since the beginning in Genesis 1, God created man in his own image ( in the image of God which was male and female). King David wanted a heart that came from nothing, completely new, and custom made by God’s divine nature ( the very make up of God).
God created my heart in His image
Righteous heart
The Lord showed me during my purification season the meaning of having a righteous heart. Many people like to be right so that they can control scenarios and how people view them. But God showed me that being righteous is more about allowing myself to be right ( justified) in God’s eyes. To put it simply, I started to care less about how justified I felt.
I started to seek to be teachable by the Holy spirit in how I nurtured my emotions and relationships. I became open to receive correction rather than remain ignorant. As I humbly sat at Jesus’s feet, I was able to rest my head on his lap and trust that He justifies me. His favor ( grace) began to flow through me and everything that I experienced carried a certain ease to it ( Proverbs 12).
I was obsessed with being pure in how I thought about things. This led to intrusive thoughts, mentally reliving sexual trauma, and unwanted sexual images in my mind. I was afraid of missing the mark on being pure.
Pure heart
God created in me a pure heart. I used to think that having a pure heart was about doing everything perfectly or doing things to make myself look more holy. I was obsessed with being pure in how I thought about things. This led to intrusive thoughts, mentally re-living sexual trauma, and unwanted sexual images in my mind ( symptom of PTSD) . I was afraid of missing the mark on being pure.
I realized that having a pure heart was more about experiencing freedom from sin or error in thinking. Like King David, in Psalm 51:10, I wanted to be filled with pure thoughts. But God did it by renewing my mind from the effects of trauma and through His word.
Related post:Childhood Trauma in Adulthood: How to Heal
Soft heart to receive the good news
“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.” –
Ezekiel 36:26-27
A soft heart yields to the good news that the Spirit of God is alive. It is holy-spirit led and not self-focus. Holy Spirit led people will experience the spiritual realities that surrounds them. There is a spiritual reality that God is real, closer than a brother, and His spirit brings life and peace ( Romans 8:7).
Holy Spirit led people accept the leading and instruction of God in their lives. They pursue God with all of their HEART and refuse to look back towards their past circumstances. They submit to the plans of God for their life and believe that it is good!
“We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps.”Proverbs 16:9
Your life is a story and God is excited about putting all of the pieces together when you allow His desires to become your desires. The pieces to your story are the characters that play a role in shaping you into the woman that you will become. The characters can be family, friends, a job, a mentor, or events that He divinely places in your path to finish a chapter or to begin a new one.
Heart for connection and love
God created my heart to be in connection with Him. He restored my heart by abiding in me as I abide in Him. One night after waking up from a nightmare, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I began to weep and cry out to God. Why me God?! Why am I so afraid. For the first time, I heard the Holy Spirit whisper to me, abide in me.
To confirm His presence, I felt the wind of God sweeping through my body with His love, light, and peace. He taught me that in His presence all fear must leave because He is love.
Good Heart- God’s redemption story is good
God looked at His creation and said that it was good ( Genesis 1). Our hearts are good in God’s eyes because God is good. Part of God’s redemptive plan is to restore our hearts back into the garden. In the garden, we are made up of our original nature – which is God’s overall beauty, holiness, purity, and goodness.
When you look at nature it is symbolic of God’s beauty, purity, and GOODNESS!
The Lord redeemed the “seed” of Eve. He mentioned to the serpent:
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring and you shall bruise his heel.”
Eve’s seed would one day crush the serpents head, bringing his evil deeds to a final end. The devil thought that he could be crafty enough to end God’s design of creation being one with the Creator. But God in His infinite ways allowed Eve’s mistake to be for her good and to bring glory to His great name.
Related post:How To Recognize The Goodness Of God In Your Life
God’s plan was good and it involved giving up his only Son to deliver His children and bring them back where it all started- the Garden. The new garden ( new home) is Him living and breathing inside of the hearts of His people.
God’s good plan was successful.
Now we can reap the benefits of having a restored image in the God who loved us from the very beginning and considered us to be good. We are no longer slaves to sin or error in our thinking. We are free to accept God for who He is and who He made us to be. We are His for eternity!
