Do not let your heart turn away from the LORD to worship other gods.
There it jumped out at me. The human heart is not something to follow, but to chaperone! It can not be trusted to take a person in the right direction, until it has been captured by the greatest of Loves.
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And only that Love can keep it in the way of life!
Show love to the LORD your God by walking in his ways and clinging to him.
Admittedly I’m not capable of loving God without His intervention. We only love Him because He first loved us. But I can come acknowledging my ways are wrong and His right. He delights to rescue the humble.
Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. … The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
For His own glory’s sake He rescues us from our duplicitous hearts and grants us hearts bent on loving Him. And as we love Him we delight to obey Him, and as we obey Him we are brought into the life we could never find by ‘following our hearts’. This is the everlasting kind of life we were designed to live from before the foundation of the world.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
So the next time you (and I!) are prompted to just ‘follow your heart’, to do what seems best for you, think again. What might it look like instead to deny yourself, to take up your cross, and to follow God’s heart as He’s shown it in His Word? This is the challenge I’m considering today. Thanks for joining me.
–LS
For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world–our faith.
Deut.11:16NLT; Deut.6:5 ESV; Deut.11:22; Ps. 51:9-10, 17 ESV; Ez. 36:25-27 ESV; I Jn.5:3-4 ESV
P.S. I’ve been reading G.K. Chesterton’s ORTHODOXY and considering his thoughts on self-confidence. This is so closely related to following your heart that you might be interested to read it also at my Book Quotes and Notes site.
These are beautiful thoughts, both here and on your other page. These past few years have been a journey for me, uncovering more places in my heart where I had been relying on my own strength, and not even realizing it. Coming to a place of physical dependency will do that to you, if you let the Lord bring His lessons home to your heart! Some days I want to cry “enough!” but thank the Lord He keeps gently bringing His truth. Oh, thank the Lord that He has overcome the world, even within my own heart! His mercies are so deep towards us!
Thank you Betty for the witness that your life bears to God’s faithfulness in PAIN. Admittedly, I do not know my own heart and where it relies for strength. (I am not good with pain, I know that). More and more I pray to ‘see’ what I need to see in order to surrender what I am clinging to without knowing it. And the older I get the more I realize how much God has pardoned me in my arrogant blindness. He is doing an incredible work in preparing to ‘present [us] faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy!’ Thanks for giving testimony to His trustworthiness, Betty.