Heart: a. our blood pumpin’ muscle b. the seat of our emotions. We’ll look at b today. We have a lot of sayings related to the heart…
“That kid has a lot of heart.” “Put your heart into it!” “Your breaking my heart.” “Absence makes the heart grow fonder (of someone else).” “A heart of gold.” “A bleeding heart.”
We have thousands of saying about the heart, most of them have a view of some internal quality about a person, anything from good to painful realities we experience on this journey we call life. It stands as something different than our intellectual life. If I say someone is all “mind” that leads me to a different understanding than if I say they are all “heart.” It’s an internal place that has emotions as part, but the bigger picture is that it is a place from which our lives are driven.
The heart is what’s at the core of us, what drives us. “out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” What’s going on in our heart is what comes out from us. There is a link there that is missed by us because we are not used to doing any heart level work, our world almost exclusively asks for intellectual work. Know this, know that, there will be a test on it later. Emotional IQ is a phrase that comes up lately, it really gets at the heart of understanding how our heart shapes things. Intellectual IQ gives us a sense of knowledge(Jeopardy potential or not) Emotional IQ asks if we are living in heart level awareness about ourselves and the world around us.
Our hearts can be satisfied or hungry, fearful or at ease, anxious or confident, broken or healed, cold and hard or soft, bitter or forgiving, evil or righteous, grieving or comforted, devious or honest, duplicitous or singular, sunk or lifted, begrudging or willing, no/half/whole hearted, stirred or ambivalent, hateful or loving, oblivious or resolved, cold as ice or burning with fire…. stay with me, there are only about 200 more.
Our heart is on a journey and that journey will take our heart to places we never wanted to go. The picture above is inevitable if your address includes planet earth. We speak intellectually about those places but are nervous or have a very small group of people with which we speak about the deepest of wounds. The Bible invites us to mourn, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” There are things locked up in our heart. Trying to avoid these things seems like a reasonable course of action to us, avoiding the pain seems less painful. But the Bible invites us to mourn, to get out from us the things that are locked up inside of us. Lancing a wound to get the build-up of infection out of us for the purpose of healing. Otherwise, if we don’t get these things out from us with honest mourning, it’s going to “come out sideways”.
I’ve appreciated that phrase, “Come out Sideways”, over the years because the more I think about it the more real it is in people’s lives. Mistrust, bitterness, hard feelings, or a lack of feeling (1,000 yard stare) at all just so I won’t feel the pain are the sideways path of an overrun heart. The thing that would truly solve our heart issues going unresolved year after year and the path we choose is walked on over and over again and before we know it, the path is so worn in, we can’t even imagine another way. Let me tell you friends, there is another way. Despair and discouragement get added to our heart condition and the sad part is, people get stuck when hope is so close.
The desire of God is not just a rennovation, trying to patch something up as best we can. God’s desire is to give us a new heart, to remove the cold broken one we have and get a transformed heart. This new heart would allow us to see our world in a new way.
It’s my prayer that we become more aware of the status or our heart from moment to moment in each day. It doesn’t take much for the joy-filled heart in the morning to be overrun by fear, anxiety, or heartache at any moment, but “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Psalm 73:26
God’s portion is always plenty.
Truth, Grace, and Time 