My article from this week's edition of the Rockford Squire:
In a countdown of the worst, yet most repeated, advice observed by humanity, “Follow your heart” is absolutely a frontrunner to win the top spot.
Scripture
describes all kinds of hearts—righteous and unrighteous, honest and
deceitful. The Psalms and Proverbs are
filled with prayers for a clean heart and admonitions to be upright in heart
precisely because the heart of humans is not by its own virtue upright or
clean. The prophet Jeremiah describes
the human heart saying, “The heart
is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
(17:9) The false prophets of Jeremiah’s
time were giving people precisely this advice to “follow your heart,” and
Jeremiah warns about them in this way: “Do
not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with
vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord… To everyone who stubbornly follows
his own heart, they say, ‘No disaster shall come upon you.’” (23:16-17)
Consider
our present experience with this same advice:
You know your own motivations, and how often can you observe, especially
in hindsight, that they were impure. You
know your own actions, and how often is your heart inclined to value immediate
satisfaction over what is right or what is beneficial. How many hearts are inclined to believe
things about themselves or about the world that are simply contrary to
observable fact? How many infidelities
have been committed or marriages severed because one or both spouses decided to
“follow their heart”? The observable
consequences to blindly following one’s heart do not speak well for the wisdom
of the advice.
Thanks
be to God that scripture never instructs us to simply follow our hearts. The heart by its own devices would not only
fail to lead us to righteous action, but it would then lead us to despair in
our failures and lose hope. Instead of
an inward-looking religion that points us within ourselves for answers,
Scripture and the Christian faith reverse the direction and point us outside
ourselves—to Christ and His cross as the solution to the errors of following
one’s heart, to Baptism as the way in which the heart is cleansed, and to the
Lord’s Supper as the food which strengthens the heart and preserves it to
eternal life.
This
outward-looking orientation overcomes our selfish inclinations, provides
certainty in the forgiveness of our sins, and looks to God’s Word to guide the
Christian and his heart.
