September 28
September 28
It is vital to understand that the members of your body will always go where your heart has already gone.
One particular word in the Bible is so central, so important, and so essential to understanding human nature and the redeeming work of God that it is nearly impossible to understand the central themes of the Bible if you don’t understand this word: heart. Almost every biblical writer uses this word, and it appears on the pages of your Bible hundreds of times. This word defines why people do the things they do and how change in a person actually takes place. Understanding the word heart will open the door to understanding what is wrong with you and what Jesus came to do to fix it.
At some point, everyone asks three questions. Parents ask them. Husbands and wives ask them. Pastors, politicians, and educators ask them. These are the questions of the average person on the street:
1. Why do people do the things they do?
2. How does change take place in a person?
3. How can I be an instrument of change in another person?
If you answer these foundational life questions without talking about the heart, then your answer will never be right.
In Jesus’s great Sermon on the Mount, he uses the topic of adultery to teach us the importance and centrality of the heart: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27–28). Jesus alerts us to the fact that adultery is first a sin of the heart before it’s ever a sin of the physical members of your body. Why is this true? Because the summary definition of the heart in the Bible is that, as the seat of your thoughts, emotions, desires, and will, the heart is the causal core of your personhood. This means that your body will always go where your heart has already gone. Physical freedom from adultery comes ultimately not from putting moral fences around your behavior, but by putting moral fences around your heart.
People do what they do because of what is in their hearts. Change always goes through the pathway of the heart. Being a tool of change in God’s hands always includes addressing heart issues.
So, if my problem is my heart, then it is right to say that my biggest problem in life is me. And, since I can’t run from my heart and have no independent ability to transform my heart, I need to be rescued. The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the story of how God works through his Son to rescue us from ourselves.
Salvation in Christ Jesus is about the enlivening, recapturing, illumining, transforming, and empowering of our hearts. Lasting heart change happens only through the means of divine grace, and that grace is ours in the person and work of Jesus.