Miles & Miles & Miles of Heart

The Bible says, "You gotta have heart." No, wait a minute, the Bible doesn’t say that, the song from “Damn Yankees” says that. It’s so easy to get mixed up.

The truth is, the Bible says – or at least implies – that you already have "heart." We’ve all got heart. The big question is, to what or whom are our hearts turned? What is the focus, the preoccupation, of our hearts?

Is there a word that we use more blithely, more carelessly, than "heart"? We say things like, "I asked Jesus to come into my heart, and my life was changed forever." Yeah, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I happen to know – from personal experience – that only moments after we let Jesus in the front door of our hearts, we boot him out the back. Moments after we commit our hearts to Jesus (or whatever, or whomever), our hearts our wandering after something or someone else.

If you ask me, our hearts are inconstant, unreliable, and fetishistic. If you ask me, it would do us no harm to be more careful about what we say regarding our hearts. It would do us no harm, and might even do us great good, to speak of heart as the Scriptures speak of them. To be informed, that is, of what God says about our hearts.