In some ways, this is scarier than a late night game of Truth or Dare. I mean, at worst, play a game with a bunch of your friends and they’ll know the secrets you keep, but laying it all out before the throne of God, with whom the balance of your soul is held? Yikes. It can be daunting! But, we serve a God who tells us to come, who delights in the sharing of our hearts, who isn’t there to smite us, but to treasure, restore, love and heal us. He loves us enough to accept us exactly as we are, but even more to not let us stay as we are. If we don’t offer Him our hearts, what can He do about it? Like any good relationship, communication is the cornerstone here, and vulnerability. We think because He already knows us that there’s no need for vulnerability. Obviously, He’s God and He knows all that is within us and doesn’t need us to tell Him, but He wants a relationship with us, and He won’t force Himself on us. He patiently waits for us to come.
Good or misleading desires, even when we know that the wants of our bodies and our hearts and our minds are diametrically opposed to scripture, even then, we are called to be vulnerable and honest with Him. That means that the we who identify within ourselves a hankering for pornography, want to face plant into a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken as an alternative to intimacy, want to have sex with our boyfriend outside of marriage, want to drink to forget, love the rush of a credit card swipe, want to bulldoze up the career ladder in prideful triumph, suddenly or maybe not so suddenly notices an attraction to the same sex, want to smite that little stinking Karen-or-other for spouting lies, have a responsibility and an invitation to be vulnerable about every yucky, awful, frustrating, confusing, insecure feeling.
And on the flip side of that, every beautiful, good and pure desire we have, too, we pour out to Him, trusting that He will align the desires of our hearts with His. Read the Psalms! Read the depth to which David goes in his lamentation, in his acknowledgement of fleshly desires that will prove to be fatal in the end, and watch how God turns his heart. Read through how He lays Himself before God, sometimes sounding even a little melodramatic, but God is there for it and listens and that’s where He can work. And sometimes He provides exactly what David desires, and sometimes, He has to change David's heart towards something better.
Either way, we have to put our hearts in His hands if we want Him to mold them, and we have to trust in His redemptive power if we want His best for us.