How God Restores Your Heart
By Anthony Delaney
This is shaped by the notes from my talk last Sunday at Ivy, first in a new series called How God Restores Your Heart.
True Confession
I’m not entirely sure when it happened.
I had great parents. A loving home. Yet somewhere along the way, I picked up a belief that has quietly shaped – and at times threatened to derail – almost everything I’ve done since:
I am only as valuable as I am useful.
Maybe it’s a middle-child thing. Could just be a human thing. But I wanted to prove myself. To be noticed, affirmed, chosen. So I ran faster. Worked harder. Achieved more. Said yes when I should have said no. And even in ministry (especially in ministry) I found this shadow mission running quietly underneath everything I did:
If I just perform well enough, everyone will love me. If I achieve enough, I’ll finally feel secure.
Sound familiar?
For a while it works. People do affirm you. The results do come. The platform grows. But then people can’t love you like you want and they let you down — and you let people down too, because nobody’s perfect – suddenly the structure you’ve been trying to build your identity on starts to crack.
I got exhausted. Not physically tired so much as soul-tired.
Because no matter how much I did, it was never quite enough. There was always another person to impress or disappoint. Another standard to meet or fail. Another voice – internal or external – saying, You could do better.
And in all that striving, I’d lost track of the most important truth about me:
God already loved me.
Before I was even born, He died for me. Before I ever knew Him, He loved me. Before I ever preached a sermon, led a team, or built anything – He loved me. Knowing that deep down resets everything because Restoration of the heart doesn’t start with trying harder. It begins with trusting more.
Why This Matters More for Leaders
I’ve learned that what I’m describing is one of the most common and least-talked-about issues in leadership.
From our earliest days — as babies searching for our mother’s face — we are formed by the desire to be wanted, chosen, noticed, and valued unconditionally. That search doesn’t stop when we become adults. It doesn’t stop when we become leaders. If anything, leadership amplifies it.
We’ll do extraordinary things looking for love. Sometimes beautiful things. Sometimes deeply damaging things. The heart’s search for love doesn’t just influence us — it forms us.
Where we look for love, and whether we find it, is where our identity gets shaped.
Some leaders look for it in performance: “If I achieve enough, I’ll be okay.” Others in people’s approval: “If they like me, I’ll like myself.” Some chase perfection: “If I can just get it right, I’ll be enough.” Others pursue popularity: “If enough people follow me, I’ll feel secure.”
Here’s the problem — even if you get top marks in all of those things, they cannot carry the weight of your identity. They were never designed to.
Performance, popularity, perfection, and people’s approval — these are what the world seems to offer. But they are not you.
Who you are? That’s a matter of the heart.
When the Bible talks about the heart, it’s not talking about the organ beating in your chest. Scripture uses the word heart to describe the inner centre of a person — the place where belief, desire, trust, motivation, and identity all live. It’s the command centre. What shapes your heart shapes your direction.
That’s why Proverbs 4:23 says: “Above all else, guard the heart — for from it flow the issues of life.”
Every day we’re surrounded by voices that want to shape our hearts. Social media metrics. Work evaluations. Relationship status. Bank balances. All of them whispering: This is where your worth comes from.
What if there’s a better source?
Meet John — The Leader Who Found It
The Apostle John is one of the most fascinating turnaround stories in the New Testament.
This is the same John who once wanted to call fire down from heaven and napalm a village that wanted him to detour round it. The same John who jockeyed with his brother James for the best seats in the kingdom — even getting his mum to ask Jesus on their behalf: “Can my boys sit at your right and left when you come into your glory?”
John was ambitious, competitive, and quick-tempered. He and James earned the nickname “Sons of Thunder”- not as a compliment.
I recognise something of myself in him. That hot-headed intensity. That hunger for position and prominence. And I know from experience that a lot of it comes from looking for significance in all the wrong places.
But then something shifted. Over three years of walking with Jesus — watching Him, listening to Him, leaning against His chest and hearing his heartbeat at the Last Supper, watching that heart stop beating as He died on the cross, meeting Him again when He rose — John’s own heart identity, how he saw himself, began to change.
He stopped defining himself by what he could do.
He started defining himself by how Jesus saw him, how Jesus loved him.
He stopped introducing himself by his accomplishments and started calling himself simply, beautifully: “the disciple Jesus loves.”
Not the most talented disciple. Not the most eloquent. Not even the most faithful — he ran away at the cross too. But he was always the one Jesus loved.
That’s the heart shift John now wants for us.
Decades later, as an old man writing to a hurting church, he writes to bring us back to the truest, safest source of identity — the same love that transformed a Son of Thunder into the Apostle of Love.
Read from one of his love letters in 1 John 4:7–19 – five truths that can restore your heart and re-anchor your identity.
1. True Love Has a Source
Everyone’s on a love search. Where do we find it?
Verse 7 cuts straight to it: “Love comes from God.”
Love is not something we manufacture through effort, personality, or hustle. It’s not something we attract by being impressive enough. It’s not a reward or medal we earn. It comes from God ‘just because..’ of who God is.
John says love isn’t just what God does — it’s who God is.
Love flows from God’s nature the way light flows from the sun. You don’t make the sun shine because you wear a nice t shirt. You don’t convince it to shine. You don’t perform for it or prove you deserve its warmth. It just gives. Because of what it is.
But this love isn’t just general – it’s specific and personal. St Augustine put it like this: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” Not as one of a crowd. Not as a category of people. As you. Specifically. Irreplaceably. You are loved.
Me too!
When we build our identity on pleasing people, performing well, and proving our worth — we’re running faster on a hamster wheel that goes nowhere. It’s exhausting isn’t it?
That’s why God invites us — and everything changes when we say yes to this — to live from love, not for it.
John once heard Jesus say He wants us to abide in His love. Not chase it. Not earn it. Not audition for it. Just rest in it — the way a branch stays connected to a vine. What grows by abiding is natural. Not by effort, but by position. By connection.
You can’t change your heart by wanting to be different. We might change some outward behaviours, but the heart begins to truly change the moment we stop striving to earn love — and start receiving it by grace instead.
More than receiving it — revelling in it! Saying every morning, whatever you’ve done or not done: “I am the one Jesus loves.” What would tomorrow look like if you said that at the start of the day and every hour after?
Restoration starts there.
2. True Love Starts with God
Everybody’s singing about love all the time. Most haven’t got a clue what it actually is.
John says it plainly: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us.” (v. 10)
True love is not our climb up toward God. It’s God’s descent toward us.
That completely resets your identity. Because if love originated with you — if God’s love was a response to your goodness — then it could also be withdrawn because of your badness. You’d always be one bad day or decision away from losing it.
But God’s love and His decision came first. Before you did anything right or wrong, God chose to love you. He chose you — to love you.
And when your sense of self rests in God’s love for you, rather than your performance for Him, your heart changes.
You don’t have to run around collecting ‘likes’ when you already have true love from the most important person in the galaxy.
You don’t have to audition for acceptance when God already cast you for a leading role in His love story.
John Chrysostom wrote: “Nothing is more powerful than a soul that loves God.” Not because of who we are — but because of what He has given us, freely, before we deserved any of it – and how much it costs so we could get it all for free.
3. True Love Cost God Everything
Real love costs. We know that because John tells us exactly what it cost God: “He sent his one and only Son… as an atoning sacrifice.” (v. 10)
That word — hilasmos in Greek — might sound like religious terminology. But it’s deeply, personally significant. It means a sacrifice that removes guilt, covers over sin, and makes peace between two parties who were separated.
That’s what the cross was. That’s what it did. For you.
God’s love is not sloppy or sentimental. It’s not a feeling that fluctuates with circumstances. It’s sacrificial. Costly. Permanent.
The price tag tells you the value.
God gave His only Son — not a song on the radio, not words on a card, not flowers in a vase, blood – on a cross. His only Son, to make me, the middle child, his son too. When I settle into that, everything looks different. I’m not just tolerated, I am treasured. My value set by what was paid for me.
When I mess up — and wow, I do. When shame comes knocking -and it will – the cross speaks a better word. God’s love, proven at the cross, redefines your worth once and for all.
4. True Love Drives Out Fear
One of the most transforming truths for leaders is on how to deal with the fear that comes with the territory of stepping up: “There is no fear in love. Perfect love drives out fear.”(v. 18)
Fear lives where insecurity rules. Wherever our identity feels fragile or threatened.
Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of being found out, exposed, or left behind.
As leaders, we often hide these fears behind productivity and performance. But they’re still there. Driving decisions. Distorting relationships. Making us smaller than we were made to be, by comparison with others.
But as God’s love settles deeper in your heart — as I keep returning to the truth of what was done for me at the cross — fear begins to lose its grip. Progressively. Steadily.
I am loved by Him. He proved it. So I don’t have to be so afraid of what people think — because I know what God thinks.
You don’t have to be paralysed by the possibility of failure, because your identity isn’t built on never falling.
You don’t have to live under the crushing weight of guilt, because you’ve been known completely and loved anyway — He’s already dealt with everything anyway already through that atoning sacrifice, past, present, and future.
That’s freedom – which is what the best leadership flows from.
5. True Love Is an Inside Job
Finally, this is where it gets most personal: “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” (v. 16)
God’s love changes your identity when you realise your heart is where God most wants to make His home. Not a building. Not a Sunday gathering. You.
Christ in you — the Holy Spirit residing in you — restores the heart by re-anchoring your identity in the truth of who you are because of who He is inside you now.
Have you invited Him in? Have you opened every room — not just the presentable ones?
God is not shocked by what’s inside you before He moves in. He’s not going to back away in horror and say, “Oh, I didn’t realise it was that bad.” He knows. He already knew when He went to the cross. And He chose to love us anyway.
He doesn’t wait for better performance. He just wants permission. He wants you to open the door and simply say: Lord, come in. I can’t fix this (me) on my own. But I’m giving You access — to all of it.
When you do that? Restoration. From the inside out.
What This Could Look Like?
Imagine a leadership team where people stopped performing for approval – and started resting in God’s love.
Imagine a workplace where believers didn’t need to prove their worth – because they already knew it and saw it in each other.
Imagine a church, a family, an organisation – where identity wasn’t built on achievement but anchored in being fully loved by God as ‘the ones Jesus loves.’
Imagine leaders who didn’t need the spotlight, because they had the light full on inside of them.
What if we became communities that lived from love — instead of for it?
I think people would notice. They’d ask: “What do they have? Why aren’t they anxious for attention? Why aren’t they desperate for validation? Who are they?”
And the answer would be: we know who we are. We are loved by God.
Where Are You Looking For Love?
So — leader, where are you looking for love right now?
Is it contingent on your performance? Your platform? Your reputation or results? Other people’s approval?
Who do you have to become — to get that love?
Or will ‘you be you’ today believing that because God is love — you can come and receive a heart full of it?
The hardest, impossible part was already done for us — at the cross.
I don’t have to earn it. I do have to receive it. Believe it:
You are loved. You are chosen. You are His.
That’s where restoration begins — not with trying harder, but with trusting more.
Anthony Delaney is the leader of Ivy Church in Manchester and a speaker, author, and coach for Christian leaders through LAUNCHCATALYST.ORG
If this resonated with you, share it with a leader who needs it – and leave a comment.
What’s the biggest lie you’ve believed about your identity as a leader?
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