Still thinking about the heart over here! Do you pray regularly for people in your life who don’t have an intimate, vibrant relationship with Jesus? And for friends, family members and colleagues who don’t know Him as their Savior? I do, and I’m sure you do, too. 

In my recent obsession over the HEART and how crucial it is to my spiritual well-being in Christ, God also showed me that in the midst of my prayers for my loved ones who are far from him, I need to be praying specifically and expectantly for their hearts. I had been forgetting to do that! My prayers have typically been for open minds, open schedules to attend church or Bible study, holy encounters with people and messages that point them to Jesus, etc. And don’t get me wrong, none of those prayers are wrong or misdirected in any way! But it all starts with having an open, soft, malleable heart.

If a person’s heart is hard, progress toward Jesus is unlikely. This is the passage—Paul’s words to the church in Ephesus—that stopped me in my tracks:

So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. -Ephesians 4:17-18