Listen to His Heart

What is your heart telling you? Listen to your heart! Follow your heart! Trust your instincts. Your heart holds the key, and so on.... I can't count how many times I've heard these well intended words. It sounds like sage advice, and is always portrayed as such in scores of sitcoms and movies. Picture the scene; a young woman is confused about two men...the one she's engaged to is stable, ambitious and maybe a little self-centered, the other is a bumbling, one pay check from homeless guy who looks suspiciously like Adam Sandler. Her dad loves the first, and hates the second, but the wise mom somehow knows the plot as well as we do. At the critical point, she steps in to advise the young lady with these words..."what is your heart telling you?" Of course we all know that Sandler gets the girl even if the other guy is perfect, not to mention, there first. And, of course her heart led her to true happiness. Sandler raises one eyebrow at the camera, gives a knowing smile...roll credits.

There's just one tiny little problem. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Jeremiah 17:9 Can we even trust our own instincts? I'm afraid not. Proverbs 16:25 tells us that "there is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." I can testify to this truth because there have been times when I've felt bitterly discouraged. In those times my heart has told me to despair, to give up, stay down...quit. Other times my heart has told me to throw caution to the wind, pursue vanity, and not let anyone get in the way of what I want. The times I've given an obedient ear to the demands of my own heart apart from God account for my portion of regrets.

What are we to do with a wicked heart? The Bible instructs us to first prepare our hearts to seek the Lord. In fact we are told in 2 Chronicles 12:14 that King Rehoboam "did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the Lord." The flip side is that those who seek the Lord with all their heart...find Him. Jeremiah 29:13 assures of this with this promise, "and ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." For me this means that I have to lay down the desires of my heart, and instead seek after the desires of His heart. As you might imagine, pride wants its own way, and yielding to the still small voice of the Lord is no easy task. I find myself wanting to have it both ways; "God, I'll follow so long as You're going my direction." The simple truth is that I can't follow and lead at the same time. I can't simultaneously hang onto those old desires and seek Him with my whole heart. It just doesn't work that way. I'm finding out that, just as I had long feared, His desires rarely match my own, and His ways are not my ways. But the closer I get to His heart, the more I can see the rubbish that was my old heart.

To know the Lord is to know that He alone knows the right path to walk. Believing this is the beginning of trust. As the old hymn goes, T'is so sweet to trust in Jesus...oh for grace to trust Him more. This is my prayer, that as I trade my heart for His, God will fill me with greater trust, and when the path isn't clear, when I'm lost and confused, I can find my way by asking the simple question, "What is HIS heart heart telling me?"