I imagine that most of us who love Jesus and wholeheartedly seek to obey and follow Him, would find it strange if Jesus told us, “You have a hard heart.” And probably the truth is that, for those of us who genuinely love Jesus Christ, any hardness of heart would only exist in certain areas, not throughout most parts of our lives.
The Gospels reveal that several factors can cause a hardened heart, such as an unwillingness to confess and repent of our sins, unforgiveness, hypocrisy, and even something as simple as focusing on natural things, including our mistakes.
Mark 8:13-21 recounts a situation with Jesus’ disciples where He explains to them that merely focusing on their mistakes and natural things led to a hard heart.
When Jesus said to them, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod,” the disciples began to try to figure out what Jesus was saying and concluded that He must have been referring to their forgetting to bring bread.
“And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, ‘Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet see or understand? Do you have a hardened heart? “HAVING EYES, DO YOU NOT SEE? AND HAVING EARS, DO YOU NOT HEAR? And do you not remember,’” Mark 8:17-18
The disciples forgot to bring bread during their boat trip across the Sea of Galilee (Mark 8:14). Although Jesus had just fed 4,000 people with a few loaves and fish, and earlier fed 5,000 in the same way, their focus was on their forgetfulness and the lack of bread, rather than on Jesus and who He had demonstrated Himself to be. Jesus explained that their hard hearts came from their natural self-focus and their thinking about their failure to bring bread. How else could they have misunderstood Jesus’ words, “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and the leaven of Herod,” as meaning, “We need bread and you forgot to bring it?”
This real-life story about Jesus and His closest disciples teaches us the unfortunate results of having a hard heart. Even when the hardness arises from just paying too much attention to our mistakes and natural things, it greatly limits our spiritual awareness in the following ways.
1. We will be unable to understand the spiritual meaning behind Jesus’ words.
2. We won’t be able to perceive the spiritual realities around us and will be limited to mainly natural perception and understanding.
3. We will forget the spiritual testimonies of what God has done for us and for others. Remembering the testimonies of God’s works reminds us who He is and what He is like. Mark 8:19-21
We can overcome these spiritual limitations by softening our hearts.
All divine abilities are given to us directly by the Spirit of God, enabling us to see, hear, understand, and remember
supernaturally. A hard heart, even one caused by something as simple as our wrong focus, will cause us to “be in this world and of it,” instead of “being in the world, but not of it”. The result is the loss of our ability to see, hear, understand, and remember the divine revelations.
All that Jesus said and taught focused on the gospel of the kingdom. He used natural phenomena to illustrate supernatural truths, but explaining the natural was not His goal or purpose. The things of the kingdom of God are spiritual and can only be understood when our hearts are softened and we become sensitive to the spiritual realm.
Here, in Mark chapter 8, Jesus doesn’t explain the statement He made concerning the leaven of Herod and the Pharisees. (Later in Luke 12:1-3, He clearly states that the leaven of the Pharisees was hypocrisy.) His response directs the disciples to examine themselves to identify what within them kept them from seeing, hearing, remembering, and understanding the Kingdom of God revealed through Jesus.
Walking by faith in the Kingdom of God requires a soft heart that is open to discovering and then repenting of any natural perspectives that prevent us from seeing, believing, and walking in the Kingdom. In the midst of trials, it is easy to forget the history of God’s goodness to us and harden our hearts.
There is a natural self-focus that leads to a hard heart, and a supernatural self-awareness that is only achieved through the conviction of the Holy Spirit, which allows me to see what God reveals through His Spirit. 1 Cor 2:9-10
Please pray with me.
Jesus, You said that God alone is good, and so You are the only one I can trust completely. Please give me the grace to keep my heart soft enough to see, hear, understand, and remember all that You say to me in the Word and directly through Your Spirit.