“Follow Your Heart?” – FBC Morning Light (5/21/2024)

Well, a good Tuesday morning to you. Hope your week, well, your work week got off to a good start yesterday and things are progressing well in the course of this week. Well, today in our Bible reading, we're in the book of Proverbs, and actually we will be for the next couple of weeks, I think, and reading today chapters two, three, and.

Four.

I don't want to zero in on just a couple of verses in chapter four, but before I do, you know, in our culture, the subject of the heart is really distorted, at least from how the scriptures present the heart.

So you hear things like, and this mantra is just repeated over and over again, you need to follow your heart. You need to do what's in your heart. You need to listen to your heart. And typically what is meant by that is basically your emotions need to rule your life.

And there's a real problem with that, because I've known too many people who have made sinful choices because of how they were feeling. They felt a certain way. So I've known married couples, for example, where one of the members, one of the spouses develops feelings for another man or another woman and decides they need to follow their heart and pursue that lover to the expense of their marriage.

And the marriage breaks up and goes off after the other lover.

Why?

Because they've followed their heart. And some pop music, for example, will talk about the error of putting your mind above your heart. You need to put your heart above your head for crying out loud. You don't want to listen to your thinking and your mind and your reasoning.

You need to follow your heart. Well, that's a corruption of the biblical notion and concept of the heart. In the Bible, when the Bible talks about the heart, it's not talking about your emotions. Sometimes that may be the priority of the particular verse, but a full-orbed understanding of the biblical concept of the heart is that it involves three chambers.

Our physical heart has four, right?

Yeah.

But our spiritual heart has three chambers. The chamber of the mind or the intellect or our thinking. The chamber of our desires, our love or our feelings and emotions. And the chamber of our volition, our will, our choices.

And a well-functioning, healthy spiritual heart, there's going to be an interrelationship between those three chambers. A heart that is out of order will neglect one of those three chambers in the process of making decisions.

So, for example, the current mantra, follow your heart, is a mantra that says, minimize, if not ignore, the thinking process of your heart, the thinking chamber, elevate the feeling chamber and make your decisions accordingly.

Whereas a healthy heart is going to be thinking rightly and making right decisions, whether or not the feelings are there, knowing that right thinking and right decisions will impact your emotions in a right way.

Now, the reason I say all that is because of what we read in Proverbs 4 and verse 23, where Solomon exhorts his son to keep your heart with all diligence or out of it spring the issues of life. Keep your heart with all diligence.

Pay attention to your intellect, emotions, and will, all three chambers of the heart. And earlier in the passage, and just to indicate the fact that he's not just talking about your feelings, earlier in the passage, in verse 20, he starts off this section when he says, my son, give attention to my words.

Pay attention to my words.

How do you do that?

With your thought processes, incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes. Keep them, the words, in the midst of your heart. Well, he's emphasizing there the mind aspect, the mind chamber of the heart.

Keep these words in your mind.

Why?

So that they can be life to you. He says in verse 22, they are life to those who find them, and they are health to all their flesh.

Why?

Because here's what they do. If you keep God's word in your mind and let his wisdom pervade your thinking, then it will shape your affections, your feelings, your love, your emotions, and it will inform your choices so that you make the right choice.

Hence the conclusion of the matter, keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. Indeed, it does. If you don't keep your heart with diligence, from what's in your heart, it'll still affect the rest of your life, but in a negative way, in a negative way.

So let me just encourage you today. Pay attention. Pay attention to your heart. What you think about that informs how you feel and determines what you do. Our Father and our God, I pray that we would take these passages and these lessons to heart.

I pray that you would come rule and reign on our heart's throne, that you might inform us of what is true, what is right, how we ought to live. And I pray that that information will then affect our affections, which then determines our choices.

Oh Lord, help us to keep our hearts with all diligence, we pray. We ask this all in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. All right, well listen, have a good rest of your Tuesday. May the Lord bless you in it.

Good day.