Deborah McDermet

The world’s advice about our heart is simply this: Follow it! If we just follow our hearts, trust our feelings and be true to ourselves, we will be happy and successful! That’s what the world teaches us about our hearts. But that is really really bad advice! Here’s what God’s Word tells us about our hearts. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”¹ Wow! That sounds a bit harsh! Surely our hearts are not that bad!

But they are! That’s what makes them “deceitful”! And, by the way, most of the time other people are not deceiving us, it is we who deceive ourselves! We not only deceive ourselves into believing we can trust ourselves to make good and wise decisions, we deceive ourselves into believing that God cannot!  It is our biggest and most common mistake: we trust us. But God tells to “not lean on [our] own understanding!”² He warns us that “whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool.”³

And yet . . . the world tells us we should lean on our own understanding and we should trust our minds, and it is not only the best thing to do, it is the right thing to do for no one should be able to tell us what to do or how to think or what to believe! And yet . . . if we want to be wise, then it might be wise to stop believing we are. Wise, that is.

It is the primary battle in our soul—follow Jesus or follow our heart. The real solution for this struggle is to follow Jesus and let him guide your heart which then can be trusted because our hearts are his. Then instead of listening to the world tell us to not let anyone tell us what to do (which is letting the world tell us what to do!), our hearts will want to follow God’s ways and our minds will begin to think clearly on how to live a good and purposeful life. God actually planned the whole thing out “for those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”⁴ because “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.”⁵ A new creation means a new heart!

When it comes to our heart, it is best to guard it from the world’s bad advice. Proverbs tells us to “keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”⁶ Our heart is to be guarded more than anything else for it determines the course of our lives. We erroneously believe that other things shape our lives – like our upbringing, our family, our circumstances, our money, our education, our skills, and although these are contributing factors, what determines—what controls and molds and governs our lives is the focus of our heart. That’s why the scripture warns us: Guard it! And guard it with vigilance, with careful attention. Remember the parable of the sower? It was “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches”⁷ that kept the guy who heard God’s Word from being fruitful. He was distracted! His heart was divided.

When it comes to having our heart’s desires, we only need to follow this advice: “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.”⁸ So, instead of following our hearts, Jesus offers a better way. He simply says, “Follow me.”⁹

¹Jeremiah 17:9   ²Proverbs 3:5   ³Proverbs 28:26   ⁴Romans 8:29   ⁵2 Corinthians 5:17   ⁶Proverbs 4:23   ⁷Matthew 13:22   ⁸Psalm 37:5   ⁹Mark 2:14