Pockets are handy, but pockets can be trouble as well. Pockets, for men anyway, are made for more than decoration on our pants. Women are always asking us to hold chapstick, lipstick, cell phones, and other semi-small objects that they don’t have a place for when they don’t want to carry their purses around with them. So, being the “perfect gentlemen” we are, we put a purse-worth of women’s stuff in our tiny, hand-sized pockets. So much, sometimes, that we have trouble fitting our keys, much less our cold hands, in our pockets because they’re occupied with stuff that doesn’t belong there. There have been times when I have had so much stuff crammed in my pockets that it felt like my pants didn’t fit. I used these little compartments for things that they weren’t designed to hold. Digital cameras are hard to fit in jean pockets or khaki pockets. Why? Because men’s pants pockets were designed to hold things like loose change, keys, and cell phones, not make-up, cameras, or bulky women’s wallets. Now, stay with me here, I’m not complaining about doing this, because we could always say no, but it bear with me a little and entertain this thought for a minute.
It’s uncomfortable to put more stuff in those little fabric pouches attached to our pants than they were designed to hold because usually we put stuff with hard or sharp corners in there that presses up against jagged keys and makes everything in the pockets dig into our legs when we sit down at the movie theater, restaurant, or where ever we are that we carry extra stuff in our pockets.
Our hearts have little pockets that are designed to hold things also. Little compartments where we hold things that are meaningful. A comment that a loved one makes, a special Christmas memory with family or friends, a day when someone close to you accepts Christ as their savior: special little memories, little pieces of life that belong in special compartments designed to hold these things in our hearts. Sometimes we try to fit large or bulky things in these pockets much like we try to do with our pants pockets. Sometimes these objects we put in our heart pockets are jagged, have sharp corners, or are too heavy for these compartments to hold. Sometimes these things we try to force in these pockets are too big to fit because the pockets weren’t meant to contain such a grand thing. The weight of overfilling our heart pockets weigh down our heart’s “pants” (if you will) and we wrestle with the painful burden of putting these things where they don’t belong, sometimes we even go to the point of trying to fold up God himself like he’s a special token written on a piece of paper in our hearts, and our heart pockets weren’t designed to contain the Creator of the Universe.
When Gabriel came to visit Mary, the mother of Jesus, he told here she would supernaturally conceive and the bible says in Luke 2:19 after the birth of Jesus, “Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.” (ESV) She was placing all these events into little compartments all over her heart that were meant to hold such memories and treasures. She didn’t try to put Jesus there, just these ponderings.
Our pockets in our hearts cannot contain the Maker of the Universe. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable when we try to do so, because it’s like trying to fit a car into your front jeans pocket. It won’t fold up, it won’t condense, and you can’t just take the parts of it that will fit and expect that car to do for you what you need it to when you take those parts out of your pocket. We can, however, take a car key in our pockets. We can take the part that will allow us to tap into the utility and power of that car, but we cannot possibly fit an entire car into our pockets.
In the same way, we cannot expect to fit the entirety of God into our heart pockets. Psalm 119:11 says, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I may not sin against you” (ESV). What do you do with the things that you store? You put it in compartments, boxes, drawers that are a part of a larger piece of furniture, zipper storage bags, you store things in compartments designed to store those things. God is not an object to be stored. There is no compartment or pouch designed to contain God because he cannot be contained. The ocean does not fit in a thimble because neither has a purpose for the other. We are supposed to store the Word of God, the keys to relationship with God and knowledge of him, in the pockets of our hearts. Why? Because that’s what those compartments are there for, that’s the intended purpose. God doesn’t fit those pockets, so why are we trying to stuff him in there? What if we quit trying to stuff God in little compartments and started packing those pockets as full as we can with God’s Word? You say, “but wait, my heart pockets can only hold so much! What do I do when my ‘pockets’ get full?” I say, I dare you to try to fill them, and let’s assume they can fill to overflowing, the Word will fall out into a friend’s heart pocket and you begin to overflow what you’re filling your heart with, and it spills over into whatever container that someone extends into the flow to catch what is falling.
The Bible says that we should fill those pockets that I might not sin against God, and I see it as looking like we try to be so filled that there is no room to fit anything else, and we continue to put more of the Word in there, and it creates a fountain of Life that flows into the lives of people around us. I challenge you to try and fill those pockets to capacity, and see how when you move, follow Christ’s way, stuff spills out, and you begin to see your life change and lives changed around you.
