At the risk of reducing the grand truth of our relationship with God to a few mere words, let me say this: God loves you just the way you are.
If you think God’s love for you would be stronger if your faith was more muscular, you are wrong. If you think God’s love for you would be deeper if your thoughts were more profound, you are wrong. If you think God’s love for you would be more abundant if you were more productive, you are wrong.
Never confuse the way God loves with the ways that humans too-often love. Our love for another habitually increases with his or her robust performance and accomplishment, and it decreases with the other’s mistakes, foibles, and shortcomings. Not so with God’s love: Father, Son, and Spirit love you just the way you are. The love of heaven never ceases. Ever!
You may spurn God, reject God, ignore God – even despise God, yet God’s love abides. Our sin and brokenness cannot diminish God’s love; our goodness and righteousness cannot increase it. Faith and belief earn you no fuller measures of God’s love nor does your stupidity and foolishness imperil it. Divine love does not decrease with your failure nor increase with your success. God’s love never ends.
And the Good News gets even better. Though God loves you just the way you are, God refuses to leave you that way. Your tendency to worry, your attitude of pessimism, your bad temper – your constant rebellion, your varied addictions to false gods, your ease of distraction by shiny baubles and the latest fads: Where on earth do you and I get the notion that we cannot change? Or better still, what makes you think that you and I cannot be changed?!
Indeed, God loves you just the way you are but refuses to leave you that way. God wants you to have a heart like Jesus. So let every heart prepare him room!
I’m reading to you from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Let God’s Holy Spirit revive in you the Word of the Lord, as another season of Advent’s new beginnings dawns brightly in the eastern sky.
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.
That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.
Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:17-30)
Christian author Max Lucado contemplates a compelling question: What if, for one day, Jesus became you? What if, for 24 hours, Jesus wakes in your bed, walks in your shoes, resides in your house, adopts your schedule, and assumes your obligations? Your boss becomes his boss; your teacher becomes his teacher; your parent becomes his parent. Your challenges, pains, and heartaches become his.
What if, for the entirety of one day and one night, Jesus lives your life with his heart? Your heart gets the day off, and the heart of Christ leads your life. His priorities govern your actions. His passions drive your decisions. His love informs your behavior.
What would you be like? Would others notice a change? Your family and friends, your classmates and co-workers – would they sense something new and different in you? Would you be more joyful, more compassionate, more forgiving? And the less fortunate – would you regard and treat them differently? Would your enemies receive more mercy from the heart of Jesus than from yours?
With the heart of Jesus beating in your chest – even if for just a day, I bet you’d feel better: less stressed, less moody, less intolerant. You’d sleep better, see the sunrise in a whole-new light, find patience in long lines and traffic jams. You might even need fewer aspirin or sedatives! Because you no longer dread what you’re dreading – even unto death.
Re-focus the lens of your imagination until you have a clear picture of Jesus leading your life, then snap the shutter and frame the image. For what you see is God’s loving desire for you: to think and act like Christ Jesus. God’s desire for you and me is nothing short of a miraculous, life-saving heart transplant.
“Throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception,” the apostle Paul tells the churches of Ephesus and so also God’s people today. “Be made new in your hearts, become a new person. Let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God in Christ Jesus – truly righteous and holy.”
The heart of Jesus is pure. Thousands adored him, yet Jesus found contentment in simple living. Women cared for him, yet he lusted not for them. Creation scorned him, yet he forgave the fallen world before anyone even thought about asking for mercy.
The heart of Jesus is peaceful. His disciples fretted about feeding the multitudes with a meager basket of loaves and fishes, but Jesus worried not. His disciples feared a violent storm, but Jesus calmed the churning waves. The apostle Peter drew his sword to fight the Romans, but Jesus lifted his hand to heal. When Peter denied him, when others ran away, when soldiers spat upon him, Jesus breathed not fire but forgiveness. Vengeance guided him not, because his heart was at peace.
The heart of Jesus is purposeful, committed to the one goal of saving humanity from its sin and redeeming its broken and fearful world. So committed to that cause was Jesus that he leaves the loving company of his Father in heaven and pitches his tent among us on earth, borne in human flesh as a helpless babe in a back-alley stable of a backwater town. And as far off as the Bethlehem feels, so also do our hearts seem distant from Jesus’s.
Nevertheless, friends, rejoice! Be of good holiday cheer! You already have the heart of Jesus! Christ has claimed you in baptism and given you his heart. Jesus has made your heart his home. By his Holy Spirit, the Lord lives in you. He has moved in lock, stock, and barrel; he has unpacked his bags, and he stands ready to change you into his likeness from one degree of glory into another (2 Corinthians 3:18).
But pastor, you fairly ask, if I already have the heart of Jesus, why do I still have so many hang-ups? Why, at times, am I such a miserable, mean-spirited fusspot? Why do so many days feel like such a long, hard slog up a steep and rocky slope? Consider the story of a woman who lived in a small house on the seashore of Ireland a century ago. She was quite wealthy but lived very frugally. Which is why her neighbors were shocked when she was among the first to have electricity installed in her humble home.
Not long after the powerline was run to her home, a meter reader knocked on her front door to ask if her electric service was working well. She assured him that everything was fine. “I’m wondering, then, if you could explain something,” the meter reader said. “Your meter shows hardly any usage. Are you using your power?” The woman replied, “Oh yes. When the sun sets every night, I turn on my lights just long enough to light my candles. Then I turn off the lights.”
The woman taps into the power but doesn’t use it. Her house is connected but unaffected. So also with you and me: our souls are saved, but our hearts are unchanged. We are connected but not altered, trusting in Christ’s salvation but resisting Christ’s transformation. Sure, we occasionally flip the switch and leave it on, but most of the time we purposely dwell in lingering shadow.
As Advent prepares us to receive the Christmas gift of Jesus, let every heart prepare him room. God loves you just the way you are, but God refuses to leave you that way. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on the first Sunday of Advent, November 9, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. It is adapted from the reflections of Max Lucado.