With All Your Heart (eBook)

Introduction

Everyone knows what you mean when you use the word heart. If you have a change of heart, you think differently now. If you say, “She gave me her heart!” she’s in love with you. If you say, “She broke my heart,” then she no longer is. If your heart was in the right place, you messed up but meant well. When our friends speak from the bottom of their hearts, they’re telling the truth. When our children say, “I cross my heart,” they might be telling the truth (this time). Sometimes we do not have the heart to tell someone the truth. If we take it to heart, we’re listening well. If we know it by heart, we’re remembering well. If you have a heart of gold, you are kind. If you have no heart, you are mean. If your team lost heart, they gave up. If they showed heart, they rallied. When you wear your heart on your sleeve, you are transparent. When you put your heart into it, your passion is obvious. The lionhearted are courageous, while the chickenhearted are spineless. Sometimes we are coldhearted, and other times lighthearted. We work halfheartedly on Monday and wholeheartedly before a deadline. We can be callously hardhearted or cowardly fainthearted. Everyone important to you is dear to your heart. Everything important about you is secured in your heart of hearts.

So does the word heart really need defining? It regularly appears in our conversations, we paste it as our philosophy of life on a bumper sticker (“I ♥ Fishing”), and we hold our hand over our heart when we sing the national anthem. Legends and stories from every culture regale listeners with the heart’s symbolism, and every religion on earth sees the heart as the defining organ of one’s inner life. When Dee Brown writes, “Bury my heart at wounded knee,” we know what he means.1 When the black clot is torn from the infant Muhammad’s chest and washed clean, we know what it means.2 When Egyptian antiquity says that the heart is weighed after death by Anubis, we know what it means.3 When primeval peoples ate the heart of a slain brave enemy or animal, we kind of know what it means.4 So transculturally, we all seem to be speaking the same language when we talk about the heart. Do we really need a book to explain it?

When Christ was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” his answer showed where true spirituality begins: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Matt. 22:37–40; Mark 12:28–33; Luke 10:25–28; cf. Deut. 6:5). If this is as important as he says it is—and it is beyond what we could ever imagine—then we need clarity about what he meant, so that we will have greater clarity in how to obey. The heart is central to the Christian faith, as it is for other religions, but that is where the similarities end. The Bible reveals subtlety, range, and depth in its distinctive message about the heart—one that diverges sharply from ancient Greek philosophy, as well as from modern and postmodern philosophies. These differences should not be ignored—as they often are in Christian literature—in favor of the colloquial and anti-intellectual ways that Western popular culture speaks of the heart. The heart merits the careful study of Scripture. In fact, I hope to persuade you that the word “heart” is the most important word in the Bible to describe who you are within. There are three reasons why we should study the heart in Scripture.

Heart Is the Most Used Word

Appearing just under 1,000 times, the word “heart” is used in the Bible more than any other for the inner self.5 The Old Testament uses the Hebrew terms לֵב‎ (leb) 598 times and לֵבָב‎ (lebab) 252 times, and the New Testament’s Greek word καρδια (kardia) appears 156 times.6 Something that occurs that often in the Bible certainly merits a study worthy of its dignity. Think of the fact that the word “holy” is used to describe God more than any other term. Is this significant? Of course it is. In the same way, the frequent occurrences of the word “heart” in Scripture deserve to be taken seriously. The spotlight is often placed on the heart for its crucial role in what you treasure and say (Matt. 6:21; Luke 6:45) and in your inner beauty (1 Pet. 3:4), repentance (Deut. 30:2, 10; 1 Sam. 7:3; 1 Kings 8:48; Jer. 24:7), faith (Prov. 3:5–6), service (Deut. 10:12; 1 Chron. 28:9), obedience (Ps. 119:34), covenant faithfulness (1 Kings 2:4), worship (Ps. 86:12; Zeph. 3:14), love (Deut. 10:12; Matt. 22:37), daily walk (Isa. 38:3), and seeking of the Lord (Deut. 4:29; 2 Chron. 15:12; Jer. 29:13)—most of which you are to perform “with all your heart” (Matt. 22:37). To draw near to God “without our heart is to pretend devotion,” since God will not accept anything from us if it is not given from the heart.7

Heart Is the Most Misused Word

Os Guinness contends that the biblical understanding of the heart and our modern understanding of the heart are almost opposite. Today, heart is understood to refer to a person’s emotions. Biblically, the heart refers to the whole person, including our capacity to think.8 Many modern readers probably have the (false) impression that a believer is determined more by feeling than by reason.9 Greek philosophy has already infected Western culture with too great of a divide between the heart and thinking. The anti-intellectualism of pop culture has also spread to the evangelical church. Many Christians align the heart with the warm and emotional side of spirituality in opposition to the supposed coldness of theology. Some Christians will say they’re “speaking from the heart” in order to defend their genuineness (not to be confused with innocence). Some say things like “How can I deny what I feel? How can I deny my own heart? I must be true to who I am!” Think of all the adolescent nonsense that pop culture has taught us to justify with the inviolable maxim “Follow your heart.”10 Such statements are not just common. They have become moral principles etched in cultural granite and are routinely used to excuse all sorts of laziness, disobedience, antinomianism, adulterous mischief, and self-indulgence that freely destroy other people’s relationships and lives. Not much can stand in its wake. Yet the Bible does not approve. And we need its clarity.

Heart Is the Most Appropriate Word

God gave words like soul, spirit, and conscience to reveal who we are as God’s image bearers. These words generally communicate one idea or one aspect of our inner nature. The word heart differs. In Scripture, its meaning shows more diversity. And yet it does this without clouding the unity of our interior self. Inner human nature is both coherent and complex. It is similar to how English-speaking peoples use only one word, snow, to describe what falls from the winter sky—no matter its texture (flaky or crusted, thin or deep, fine or wet, soft or heavy). In contrast, the tribal Yup’ik people in northern Alaska and Canada employ multiple lexemes to describe these different types and textures of snow.11 The word “heart” in Scripture does both. It reflects our singular core and yet it has a variety of nuanced meanings. “Heart” is the Bible’s inclusive term to communicate our unified and rich nature within.12

Unity

Whenever we read the word “heart” in Scripture, we should first understand it as a comprehensive term that captures the totality and unity of our inner nature. For John Owen, the heart indicated all the faculties of man’s spiritual life and the one principle of our moral operations.13 Here is the source “of motives; the seat of passions; the center of the thought processes; the spring of conscience.”14 It’s like a “hidden control-center” in every person.15 Everything we think, desire, choose, and live out is generated from this one “controlling source” and is governed from this one point.16 Abraham Kuyper said that the heart is “that point in our consciousness in which our life is still undivided and lies comprehended in its unity, . . . the common source from which the different streams of our human life spring.”17 From the heart “flow the springs of life” (Prov. 4:23). What the physical heart is to the body for health, the spiritual heart is to the soul for holiness. As goes the heart, so goes the man. It is the helm of the ship.18

Complexity

The Scripture presents the heart not just as a unity but also as a trinity of spiritual functions: the mind, the desires, and the will.19 To put it another way, the heart includes what we know (our knowledge, thoughts, intentions, ideas, meditation, memory, imagination), what we love (what we want, seek, feel, yearn for), and what we choose (whether we will resist or submit, whether we will be weak or strong, whether we will say yes or no).20...