How to Bring Your Whole Self to God

In Psalm 9, David boldly declares:

Our whole hearts? All of them? Even the messy, sad, scared, anxious, and ashamed parts?

Similarly, in Psalm 86, David prays:

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself with a divided heart. Instead of wanting God with my whole heart, a part of me wants God, a part of me wants comfort, a part of me wants to run away, and another part of me would feel quite content to numb out on Netflix or social media.

Still, the Great Commandment compels us forward:

Jesus’ challenge to us is to love God with our whole heart — our undivided heart — a heart where every single part of us is alive, connected to, and engaged with affection for God. A heart that is free from shame, fear, anxiety, and disconnection.

I would even argue that the goal of our spiritual life is that we would be perfect in love or, as John says, that God’s love would be “perfected in us” (1 John 4:12).

Unfortunately, nobody just wakes up one day with their heart fully in love with God.

The human condition is that we are so enamored with a thousand lesser loves — with a thousand other lovers competing for our attention.

The curse that echoes from Eden is that Adam and Eve, in a time of weakness and shame, ran from God instead of to him.

Every time we experience shame or weakness and we run from God instead of to him, we hide our hearts from the one who made us and loves us perfectly, and the curse of Eden reverberates into our lives.

In Leviticus 6:12, the priests throw wood on the fire every single day to keep the perpetual fire of prayer and worship burning in the tabernacle.

Similarly, we, as royal priests, cultivate a perpetual fire of love for God in our hearts by learning how to throw the wood of our shame, insecurity, and fear (the divided parts of our hearts).

This is how we redeem and restore what was lost in Eden: we run to God instead of from him in our time of need. I would argue that all of sanctification and our journey of growing in God can be boiled down to this simple question: are we learning to run to God instead of from him?

Can we see everything as “wood” — something we bring into the fire of our continual conversation with the living God — even (and maybe especially) the hard, messy and sad bits.

This is how we build a prayer life: we bring everything to him.

Here are at least a few reasons why we can struggle to bring our whole hearts to God:

• we’re ashamed of ourselves

• we’re afraid that God will judge us

• we’re too anxious to face difficult parts of our hearts

• we lack of time and get lost in busyness

• we’re uncomfortable with our negative emotions or afraid of pain

• we are unaware of what we’re actually feeling, and so we can’t bring it to God

• we’d prefer to numb out than to pray

• we feel that because we’re experiencing pain or difficulty, God has let us down or disappointed us

Can you relate to any of these?

While I don’t want to pretend that a simple email can fix our whole prayer life — it takes a lifetime to learn how to “pray without ceasing” and how to see everything as wood for the fire — I’d love to offer us some good news this morning.

Here’s the good news:

1. We have a Father who knows what we need before we ask him.

Jesus says this when he is teaching the disciples how to pray:

This means that no matter what we’re feeling — shame, fear, anxiety, discouragement, disillusionment, cynicism — whatever it is that’s trying to push us out of the garden (so to speak) — the Father already knows what we are struggling with!

And, more than knowing what we are struggling with, he knows the solution, too.

And, by “solution,” I don’t necessarily mean a quick-fix that’s going to get rid of all our problems, I mean that the Father knows what we need much like the Shepherd in Psalm 23: he knows exactly what type of rest and what type of green pasture his sheep need to lie down in.

He knows how to restore us.

2. We have a Friend who has been tempted in every way as we are.

Whatever we are facing, Jesus has faced it too. Betrayal by religious leaders, temptation, persecution, exhaustion, complex family dynamics, you name it, Jesus has faced it.

The writer of Hebrews says:

Do you primarily engage Jesus as a distant deity who is unacquainted with your struggles? When was the last time you encountered the compassion Friend with grace in his eyes who wants to help us in our time of need?

3. We have a Helper who helps to keep Jesus’s commandments.

And, if having a perfect Father and a perfect Friend isn’t enough, we have a Helper who lives on the inside of us!

Jesus says:

Jesus says that the Holy Spirit is here to help us to keep his commandments. And what are his commandments?

Check out that verse above in Matthew 22 — that we would God with all of our hearts!

This is wild — the Holy Spirit is here to help us bring our whole hearts to God! It’s his specialty! It’s what he does!

So, what does this look like in practice?

Practically, I’d love to invite us today to sit down and ask the Helper, the Holy Spirit, to identify: is there a part of your heart that you are tempted to hide from God? A part of you that you are tempted to deal with on your own, rather than bringing it to your Father and Friend?

What’s the emotion you are afraid of facing?

What sin pattern are you afraid of naming?

What memory are you trying to forget about?

What’s the situation or relationship that is causing you anxiety that you’d rather escape from?

Then, write it down and simply let God love you in the middle of it. Don’t try to fix it (God is way better at that than you are anyway), simply bring it into the presence of God and see what God does.

If I can ever support you in your journey of coming alive and living in love with Jesus, please don’t hesitate to hit “reply” on this email and let me know.

-Ryan

P.S. It is one of the greatest joys of my life to help people come alive and live in love with Jesus, especially by waking up to the continual conversation we get to enjoy with God. Our team is working on creating some beautiful prayer resources this year, starting with a daily prayer journal designed to help you grow in your ability to hear God’s voice. Please consider becoming a founding partner with us to receive every resource we create in 2025 completely free!