Worst Advice Ever!

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.