The Importance of The Heart

I. God Cares About Our Heart

Our culture has made the heart mainly about emotions. Look at an illustration of a heart and you think of love—an emotion. And our culture has separated the mind from the heart. Love is a feeling and has no rational aspect to it.

Proverbs 4:23 CSB

23 Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.

The use of the term heart is multifaceted in the Bible. The heart deals with the will, affections, patterns of feeling and emotions, and deep thoughts

Emotions and passions are important to God.

Colossians 3:23 CSB

23 Whatever you do, do it from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people,

Galatians 5:22–23 CSB

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.

The fruit of the Spirit speak of virtues that are not just thoughts but dispositions and emotions of our being. Joy, peace, and kindness speak to more than just our mind but to our emotional state as well.

However, Paul shows that the biblical writers believed that the human heart was more holistic.

Romans 10:9 CSB

9 If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Paul says that you can believe in the resurrection (doctrinal belief in a historical event) in your heart. There is a holistic approach to thinking and feeling in the Christian faith.

Matthew 22:37 CSB

37 He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

II. Be Careful With Your Heart

“Follow your heart” has become a mantra of contemporary society. But sometimes our heart can forget about the real world we live in:

The Heart Can Deceive

Jeremiah 17:9 CSB

9 The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?

James 1:6 CSB

6 But let him ask in faith without doubting. For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind.

Romans 1:28 CSB

28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right.

Romans 1:29 CSB

29 They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips,

Hearts Can Become Hard

Matthew 13:15 CSB

15 For this people’s heart has grown callous; their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; otherwise they might see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn back— and I would heal them.

Matthew 15:19–20 CSB

19 For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander. 20 These are the things that defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person.”

Romans 2:5 CSB

5 Because of your hardened and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment is revealed.

Hearts Can Become Unbalanced

Church history has had its moments when the emphasis of the heart became unbalanced.

“The underlying assumption of a faith of the heart is that affection and emotion are the most significant features of personhood” (Dennis P. Hollinger, Head, Heart and Hands: Bringing Together Christian Thought, Passion and Action [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005], 22).

However meaningful, an overemphasis of the heart has consequences:

(1) Faith is dependent on emotional state and peak spiritual experiences.

(2) Unorthodox faith which is based on feeling and not objective truth can develop (“it’s true to me because of what my heart tells me”).

(3) Finally, God becomes individualized and can’t speak to social issues that involve careful thought and discernment.

III. Having A Right Heart

Listen

Luke 24:32 CSB

32 They said to each other, “Weren’t our hearts burning within us while he was talking with us on the road and explaining the Scriptures to us?”

The primary way God speaks to us is in Scripture. If we think God is speaking to us, but the message is contradicting his written Word, we need to consider our capacity for self-deception. There are many stories of people throughout history who have done terrible things, believing that God’s voice told them to do it. An extreme example is that of a man who murdered two people, telling police that “God told me to do it” (www.foxnews.com/us/2017/01/27/suspect-says-god-toldme- to-do-it-after-fatal-crash.html).

Perhaps you are a person who is more inclined to the mystical. You thrive off the heart, emotions, and passions. You might not really care about doctrine or theology. But-God doesn’t want you to become one legged stool. Take time in your personal devotion with God to study more about him. Start off by learning the attributes of God (holiness, justice, providence, etc.). Delve deeper into the knowledge and understanding of the nature and character of God.

Trust

Psalm 28:7 CSB

7 The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I am helped. Therefore my heart celebrates, and I give thanks to him with my song.

Release

Luke 6:45 CSB

45 A good person produces good out of the good stored up in his heart. An evil person produces evil out of the evil stored up in his heart, for his mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.