Fellowship with God requires a sponge-like heart

Ezek 11:19

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, (ESV)

      Fellowship with God has to start with God’s agape for us. There is no way to fellowship with God except through admission that nothing in you can reach Him. This admission shows us the answer is not in ourselves. Whenever we forget this, we have to come back to it. In every other religion, the initiation of fellowship with God rests on humanity. In other religions Gods are often seen as far-off entities who have to be appeased and pursued by humans before any relationship can begin. Not so with Christianity!

     Instead of working our way to God, we turn to Him trying to receive anything He might do in drawing us to fellowship with Him. Think Christ on the cross for you, think Holy Spirit in the darkness of your soul trying bring life and light to your death and darkness. In God’s agape, He pursues us in our darkness and sins, we do not fix ourselves up so that He can reach us, there is no chance for that to happen.

     Our greatest possibility for life is to allow God to give us hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. God’s Spirit is at work trying to break up the hardness, He is trying to help us lower the walls that keep God out. The walls or the hardness is our effort to protect ourselves, it is also the very thing that keeps God’s agape from penetrating our hearts. The Holy Spirit wants to turn our center into a sponge that can be filled with God, instead of our center being a diamond-stone that will never contain God, the One who is Agape and Light.

 Zech 7:12

They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear the law and the words that the Lord of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets. (ESV)

Fellowship with the Trinity always rests on our willingness to allow God to make sponges, or good soft receptive soil in our center. In humility our heart becomes soft and receptive to God’s agape, when our heart is filled with God it will start to drip away from us to others, there can be no other response. We cannot hate when we are filled with God’s agape, we do not walk in the darkness when are filled with God’s light.

     Our greatest responsibility as God’s children is to agape God with our all. However, John says it is not agape for man to agape God, rather we agape God by obeying Him in agape-loving one another (John 4:10). This will never be possible until we first receive and soak up God’s agape for us.