"Prostituting" Your Heart

I heard a wonderful message yesterday at the high school group I volunteer in. The speaker spoke of how it is so easy to prostitute your heart. When I heard this it shocked me, but then I heard the explanation. Oh my gosh was it right on!

The speaker spoke of how instead of going to God for our healing when we are hurting or seeking "something" whatever it may be, we put our heart out there on the line. So often, when there is a void in our life instead of going to the ultimate healer, we go to everyone else and try to give them our broken heart to heal, but yet the only one who can truly heal it is the last person we usually go to.

A comparison was made to someone who has been shot in the stomach. When someone is shot in the stomach, there is much blood and pain. If the wound is not properly taken care of, it will become infected and puss will gush out of it. The bullet would remain in the body as a nagging pain. Now, to make this all make sense: we are like that person who has been shot, denying that anything is really wrong. We claim that we'll be fine and we go around asking everyone else (without their knowledge) for the healing we are searching for, putting all of the pressure on them. It isn't until we go to God and ask Him to remove the bullet and perform the necessary surgery that we can become healed, with only a minute scar remaining.

God is the ultimate healer and He is whom we should be going to with all of our troubles, pains, frustrations, etc. If Christ is at the center of our heart, then we won't have the need to "prostitute" our heart because the ultimate healer would be living inside of us.

So here is my thought: I say that I have Christ in the center of my life, therefore he assumably resides within my heart, but do I reflect a Christ-like attitude in how I handle situations, not just people? While I previously discussed how very important it is to treat people with love and grace the way that Christ would and did, it is equally important, in my mind, that our actions and reactions to and in situations be reflective of that same desire to "follow" Christ (being Christ-like), not to just be content with the easy way out. So, do I have Christ as the center of my heart? Is he the overflow out of my mouth when I speak (Matthew 12:34b)?