When I was a child, I was told over and over again that to become a Christian, I needed to ask Jesus into my heart. Which I think I did (probably) about 3 million times because I wanted to make sure that it took.
These sorts of things you’re told as a child really stick with you in ways that escape your own awareness. It’s the baked-in part of spirituality—the foundation below the surface on which the spiritual life is built.
Now, as an almost 40 year-old adult, I’ve come to the pleasant and enlivening realization that asking Jesus into one’s heart is only half the picture. The other half is now so obvious to me that I can’t believe I never thought about it before:
Becoming a Christian is just as much about Jesus inviting us into his heart as it is about us inviting him into ours.
This precious video really sums up the version of the gospel I was given as a child:
Name It, Claim It
Don’t misunderstand me: I think that teaching people that becoming a Christian is about inviting Jesus into one’s heart is a good thing. It comes from the revivalist roots of my Pentecostal tradition. Revivalism was always just as much about encouraging longtime Christians to make their faith real and personal as it was about converting non-Christians.
Revivalism is always concerned with the person that treats their Christianity like they might treat where they grew up or who their parents are—not as something that they chose, but as something that recedes into the background. It’s indeed true, but bears little relevance in day to day life.
Revivalism is to Christianity what patriotic movements are to the nation-state. Both are about owning one’s citizenship and letting it be the explicit reason for everything.
In other words, revivalism is always against nominal Christianity. Asking Jesus into your heart makes your faith your own, not something you default to by accident of culture and family and historical circumstance.
The Soap of Revival
The problem that has taken root in free church revivalist traditions like Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is that it often reduces the Christian life to conversion itself. Sin, as God said to Cain, is always crouching at the door. And revivalism suggests that more often than not we open wide the door despite hearing sin’s growl. The lion pounces and gobbles us up.
The solution, then, is to re-convert. Or, as it was often put to me, one must “re-dedicate” as often as there is sin and failure.
When I was an adolescent, retaining my salvation became to me like trying to hold onto a bar of soap on a summertime slip-and-slide. Or like trying to wrestle a greased-up pig. Both are possible. But for all except the lucky or adept few, it inevitably slips out of the grasp. Like the soap, I always felt the harder I tried to hold onto my salvation, the more easily it would slip out.
Not By Might
So, the challenge was to get Jesus to abide in me with all my might. Spend a lot of time in prayer. Put in the effort. Jesus himself said it in the imperative, and that meant that abiding was a matter of obedience to divine law (John 15:7).
But that’s only the first half of Jesus’s “law.” Jesus also promises that it’s a two way street. Even as we ask Jesus to abide in us, he's also inviting us to abide in him. Which really changes the tone of the whole thing to be less of a commandment and more of an invitation.
A gift.
The Sacred Heart
Nowhere does the Bible say that we should let Jesus “invite us into his heart.” Equally, neither does it say in Evangelical fashion that to become a Christian is to pray a “Jesus-come-into-my-heart” prayer. But both are still important.
Throughout Jesus’s ministry the human heart is repeatedly referenced.
Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart.
So it’s obvious where the impulse to talk about the heart comes from. But what we miss all too easily is that Jesus had a heart. And he still does. He became incarnate, and so had a beating fleshy heart full of blood and passion. And he became incarnate precisely to show us the heart of God, the fount of divine love.
All of which is to say that we need to read all the stuff about our hearts as the two-way street Jesus promises that it is:
Jesus loves us with all of his heart (and mind and strength).
We’re Jesus’s treasure. And that’s where his heart is also.
Jesus speaks out of the abundance of his heart.
What he speaks is an invitation. Not a command, but a kind and welcome request:
Joseph Lear, come into my heart.
Hear him say it to you, too:
[insert your name here], Come into my heart.
👉Share this with someone who needs to know they’re the treasure in Jesus’s heart.
So important! Thanks, Joseph!