After Jesus was raised from death, but before He ascended to heaven, He was seen by His disciples and many other people over the next 30 days. On one occasion two people walking along the road to a city called Emmaus were joined along the way by Jesus, but the travelers did not recognize Him. As they walked, Jesus talked to them about the scriptures and all that was written about Himself. At some point the travelers finally recognized that it was Jesus who had walked and talked with them just before He disappeared from their sight. They said to one another, “Did not our hearts burn within us while He opened the scriptures to us?”
My message today is on the experience of how we can know when God touches our hearts. In 1 Samuel 10:26 scripture says, “And Saul also went home to Gibeah; and valiant men went with him, who hearts God had touched.” God’s ways are not our ways so He can touch anyone at any time He wants for any reason He wants. He can touch us in response to our prayers for ourselves. And guess what? He can touch us in response to someone else’s prayers and needs. I want to talk to you about how we can know that He has touched our heart even if we were not seeking a touch of God in that way.
First, when God touches your heart, you are likely to do something out of the ordinary for you but extraordinary for others because you respond to His presence. God touched the hearts of those valiant men so that some valiant things of God would happen around King Saul. God’s touch can cause some people to use their strength in ways mightier than what others can face on their own. They will serve people who need strength and the sense of victory in their lives.
When God touches the heart of a person, that person will become humble under the strength and service of God for the benefit of someone else. When God touches the heart of a humble person, that person will be strengthened to a place of valiant acts beyond what he or she could have ever imagined. When God touches our hearts, we will go with the people God is directing, and we will carry with us a sense of valiant strength, determination, courage, confidence and favor that will be present in all we are.
When God touches your heart, He will make you to stop talking so much, and you will start listening more than you ever have. In a way, He makes you act because you have first listened, instead of talking and acting but hardly listening at all. This disposition of listening and learning is the state of the heart that makes us think our hearts are burning inside of us. And in a way, the heart is burning. It is on fire to hear more, to take in more, and ready to be transformed more by what it has never experienced.
When God touches your heart, people learn to see your heart before they hear your words. When God touches your heart, He enables you to live from what is in your heart more than by what is before your eyes. If you learn to live this way, you will find God in all that you see because you will see with the eyes of your heart, the place where God lives and abides in you.
When God touches your heart, He makes you to live in joyful expectation of having what you have never asked for but now you know that you have need of it. If you have lived a life independent of God, when He touches your heart, you realize that He is the key to your life and all life, so you live in joyful understanding of His presence. In the places where God is present, miraculous things will happen all around, over and over again.
When God touches your heart, you wake up each day a changed person because God’s touch is life changing, never ending, and always transforming. You will approach every new day as if you are a new person because God’s touch of the heart kills something old and brings to life something new in each of us. You cannot remain the same as you were before God touched your heart. When He touches your heart, He deposits something of Himself into you, something that you were missing. You can recognize more of His ways because you have more of His presence in your life. When God touches your heart, you begin to touch the hearts of others in ways that you never did before. To some of us, He may seem to disappear from the things we see, but this is only so that He can appear right in the heart of who we are and who we should be for Him. Live a Delivered Life. Love you.
Live Delivered 