Passover looms. I examine myself. I plead for God’s help.

Still within me lies this human heart. Deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. My number one task remains daily soliciting God’s aid in circumcising that heart—and daily submitting to God so that He may create a new, clean heart within me.

A heart like my father David’s—a heart after God’s own heart.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” Christ says. That is the command. You shall hold nothing back.

David kept that great commandment perhaps better than any mere human ever has. I thank God for the Psalms that enable me to scrutinize the most intimate details of his relationship with God and emulate them.

“O God, you are my God—I yearn for you—body and soul, I thirst—I long for you—like a land without water, weary, dry. … Your love is more than life to me” (Psalm 63:1, 3; Moffatt). How did David achieve such an unnatural craving, such heartfelt, Christ-like sincerity in his innermost being?

By training his heart. With diligence, vigor and violence.

David trained his heart like a great general trains a soldier, demanding constant exercise to run it in its proper course. That is the only way to train something so unruly as a human heart.

“[M]y mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips: When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. … My soul followeth hard after [or cleaves to] thee …” (verses 5-6, 8; Moffatt). David trained his thoughts on God—as he was drifting into sleep, when he woke in the deep night, as he rose in the early morning—always on God.

David prayed three times a day: evening, morning and noon (Psalm 55:17). He praised God several times a day (Psalm 119:164). He set his heart on God—over and over—throughout his waking hours. I am not too busy to emulate him. David knew that, as occupied as he was with the affairs of state, a failure to take time to commune with God would guarantee that those physical matters would swamp his heart! To love God with all his heart demanded never allowing that to happen.

“My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate upon thy promise” (Psalm 119:148; Revised Standard Version). ”At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments” (verse 62). At times when he awoke at night, David not only meditated on the things of God—he rose from bed and got on his knees in order to offer proper thanks for those things. “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in thy words” (verse 147; rsv). Perhaps David wasn’t the best sleeper—but what an active spiritual life he had when the house was quiet, when he wouldn’t be disrupted, when the noise of his daily responsibilities had died down—when he could hear himself think. How much did those thoughts and prayers in the dark help him to nurture his love for God?

David trained himself to keep God at the center of his life, so the love of God that comes only from the Spirit shed abroad in our hearts could flow. His Psalms detail how he did that—but even the existence of the Psalms says so much! David shaped, composed and recorded these beautiful, God-centered thoughts and emotions. He didn’t have a spontaneous wellspring of love that he simply had to express—he had that love because he worked to express it.

As long as he maintained this focus, then his thinking, his interests, his passions—what was in his heart—was the same as what was in God’s heart. That’s not to say he never went off track. But how he worked to discipline his mind—control his thoughts—bridle his emotions.

That is loving God with all the heart. Not a deceitful, wicked heart—but a new, clean heart, gifted to Him by a God who was deeply moved by this extraordinary father-son bond.

“When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek” (Psalm 27:8). God wanted David to seek Him! And when He made that call, David’s heart answered. From his innermost being, he reached out for intimate communion with God.

“Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord” (verse 14). A beautiful promise. How desperately I need that strength of heart which only God can supply.

David’s heart was deceitful and desperately wicked, like mine. But what an example of allowing God to convert that heart. David truly circumcised his heart. He sought God’s help in training and disciplining his thoughts, feelings, affections, emotions, passions—and directing all those to serve God. By doing so, he enabled God to create a clean heart in him—a heart after God’s own.

And he loved God with the whole of it.

I pray, like my father David: “Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my reins and my heart” (Psalm 26:2).