you can't be half-hearted.
If you're gonna be half-hearted,
you're gonna lose out on half of your life.
If you're wholehearted,
you can experience everything that God has for you.
Habit nine is be wholehearted.
So all of the other habits fall under the rubric
of being wholehearted.
That is giving your total self,
everything to God and to these habits
that we've been talking about.
You can't be half-hearted.
If you're gonna be half-hearted,
you're gonna lose out on half of your life.
If you're wholehearted,
you can experience everything that God has for you.
Now, this is amazing.
There's over 31,000 verses in the Bible
and some 24,000, over 24,000 talk about the heart.
You could argue that the Bible
is exclusively about our heart.
Jesus, when he was asked,
what is the greatest commandment?
What is the greatest way to live?
And he said, you shall love the Lord your God
with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength,
and your neighbor as yourself.
And I think that sums up what wholehearted is
and what I believe it is.
It's loving God with all of your heart
in everything that you do.
It's loving him with all of your soul,
your mind, your strength.
It's loving him with all of your being.
That's what I mean by wholehearted.
Wholehearted is loving God with everything.
Most of us are living half-hearted
because that's the way we've been taught.
And that's because of shame in our life,
because of failure in our life,
because of hurt relationships,
because we've had betrayal in our hearts and in our lives,
we retreat into fear.
We retreat into a lack of courage.
And my challenge to you here on this final chapter
is be wholehearted.
That means live free.
Go for it with your life.
Whatever it is you're giving yourself to at your job,
in your marriage, in your relationships,
in your future vision that you have, in your research,
whatever it is God's called you into,
be wholehearted, be all in.
And because of that,
the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
So Jesus said, I came that you might have life,
John 10, 10, and that you might have it abundantly.
But the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, Jesus said.
So the enemy comes to steal away your desires,
to destroy your passions,
and to create death over your life,
and to make you, push you down,
and press you into being half-hearted
in everything that you do.
And God wants you wholehearted.
He created you to be wholehearted.
It was the church father, Arrhenius, who said,
the glory of God is a man fully alive.
So God wants you fully alive.
He wants you to love him with everything.
He wants you to love what you do.
He wants you to give all that you can
in everything that you do.
So what's the problem?
Why do we struggle with this?
And the reason we struggle is because of several things.
And the first one I would say,
is we've learned to be posers.
We've learned to be pretenders.
We've learned to hide who we truly are.
And so being wholehearted is recognizing
that we tend to pose.
We tend to care more about what other people think about us
than being authentic to who we really are.
I wanna challenge you that God wants to break
that posing spirit and give you
a wholehearted devotion to him.
And that comes through intimacy with God.
That comes through having an intimate relationship
with Jesus Christ and being aware of who you are in Christ
and that you're beloved, that you're loved,
that you're a son of God, that you're a daughter of God,
that God has created you for a purpose.
He's created you to be a priest and a king.
And with that comes confidence.
And the more confidence you have,
the more wholehearted you can be.
And so I think that this posing attitude,
this posing and pretending kind of spirit
comes over all of us.
We all struggle with that.
And that's related to shame.
It's because of that shame in our background
that has caused us to go inward
and to lose our self-confidence
and to lose our God confidence in our life.
And so we break out of that by asking God,
Lord, would you empower me with your Holy Spirit?
Would you free me up with your Holy Spirit?
We have this mantra that we say
when we have our whole heart advances.
And these are men's retreats.
that we do once a year up in the mountains of Colorado.
Someone shouts out, whole heart,
and then the guys all respond with, live free.
Whole heart, live free.
That's living with your whole heart.
That's living free.
That's walking in that joy and in that freedom
that God has for you,
is taking action in those areas of our life
that are hindering us,
whether it's shame, pride, arrogance,
that cause us to be posers.
So I wanna challenge you in this last episode of my book,
How You Walk and How Do You Break Out
of These Fears in Our Life.
We do that, men and women, by being wholehearted,
asking God to give us his presence and his power
to break out of half-hearted living.
So as we go into the end of this,
I just wanna challenge you, be wholehearted.
Give everything you've got to God,
and let God set you free on a course of wholehearted living
that's going to set you free.
I love you.