Prayer For Our Hearts to Be Directed into Love
David W Palmer
(2 Thessalonians 3:5 NKJV) “Now may the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God and into the patience of Christ.”
The third prayer we look at concerning love is found in this passage. The Holy Spirit led the apostle Paul to pray that the Lord would “direct your hearts into the love of God.” This, therefore, is another prayer we can pray for others and for ourselves. Let’s find out what it means, and why the Holy Spirit led Paul to pray it.
In the original language, the word translated “direct” means to guide and direct. Paul is praying that the Lord will guide and direct their “hearts” into God’s love. In other words, that the inner-witness of the Holy Spirit will shepherd them through their spirits into actions and choices that will be for the highest good of all involved. This is a crucial prayer for us to pray today. We certainly need God’s help and wisdom to know what is the most loving way forward; and then we need his grace to be able to stick to that narrow, constricted path of loving others—doing unto them as we would like to have things done unto us. (See: Mat. 7:12–14.)
We must also not neglect the last section of the above verse, in which the Holy Spirit prays that the Lord directs us “into the patience of Christ.” This has a twofold application: when we show patience with other people, it helps them to feel loved—an absolutely worthy goal in itself. Plus, he prays to God for this because will need Jesus’s own persistent endurance working in and through us to overcome the enemies of patient love (1 Cor. 13:4). There are many of them—urgency, impatience, judging, giving up on people, and time pressures, etc. But when the Holy Spirit directs and empowers us in the “patience of Christ,” we can overcome them all.
As we are led into love, Jesus expects us to love: God the Father, himself, each other, and the people of the world like he does (John 3:16). He clarifies this by commanding us to love one another as he has loved us (John 13:34), and that we should love our neighbour as ourselves (Mat. 19:19). God’s word elucidates the love he expects of us by saying, “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you” (Mat. 7:12 NLT). And he describes love in the famous 1 Corinthians 13 passage: “Love is patient and kind, etc.”
In answer to the prayer from 2 Thes. 3:5 (above), the Lord will direct our hearts into love. But is this just a nice feeling? The apostle John is clear in his message that we should love our brothers and sisters in deeds and in truth, not by merely giving them lip service. He says in effect, “Love is what love does”:
(1 John 3:18 AMPC) “Little children, let us not love [merely] in theory or in speech but in deed and in truth (in practice and in sincerity).”
In the New Testament, Jesus gives us one new commandment: “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34, 15:12 CSB). It has many aspects and applications. Love is the fruit of the spirit, and the goal of the commandments; it also involves laying down our lives—our wants, desires, urgencies, and priorities—for the needs of others. We need to take Jesus’s command to love very seriously, and make it a priority in our lives:
(Ephesians 1:4 NKJV) “Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.”
From eternity past, God the Father’s dream has been for a loving family. In pursuit of this desire, he set up the whole new covenant—the new birth, and us in Jesus. His final objective—through the whole process of birth, sin, forgiveness, regeneration, and grace—is that we should be “holy” and blameless before him “in love.” Love is the final word of the ultimate outcome. Yes, love is, and always has been, God’s objective.
God wants us to be holy, hence the empowerment of his grace. He wants us without blame; hence Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection—with us in him. And He wants us to be guided by
