heart VS mind

In Deuteronomy 6 God gives a command that is a bit different than the scores of other commands he gave in the Law. All the other command, almost without exception had to do with what one did with their hands or their voice in an act of obedience to God.

Deut 6:7 is different. It for the first time deals with the inner relationship man is to have with God. I want you to look close at the wording…

Deuteronomy 6:5-7 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Later in the New Testament Jesus would later repeat this and call it “the greatest commandment” Instantly we have a problem…

How does a person in the O.T. or the New or even us here today go about loving God with all your heart? You heart is the organ that pumps blood through your body….the Bible doesn’t really mean that your supposed to love God with your heart…. That’s obviously a figure of speech. If your are going to love God it is going to have to take place in your mind… not in your heart.

When you tell your wife or girlfriend that you love them with all your heart.. What you really mean is that they are consuming your mind and you are mentally focused on them… isn’t that right.

I used to have a Professor who served as a missionary in Central America and he said in that particular place the people said to each other, in their language, “I love you with all of my liver.

So what we are talking about here, and even in our current vocabulary, is just a figure of speech that means “My mind is completely devoted to you! Isn’t that right?

The answer is No! No! No!, that’s not right. The Bible is very insistent on the difference between one’s heart and one’s mind. The words are not interchangeable.

On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"What is written in the Law?" he replied. "How do you read it?"

He answered: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'^[]; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'^[

"You have answered correctly," Jesus replied. "Do this and you will live."

Why did he do that? Why did he add a fourth part to the three Moses wrote in the Law?

I suggest He did it to clear up what may have been confusion about this whole heart thing.

If he quotes first that we are to love God with all out heart first then ends with… oh and also.. You need to love God with all your mind people would come to understand that they are not the same thing.

It is apparently possible for someone to have a mental grasp of God with out having a heart grasp on God.

If you are a mature Christian I probably don’t have to convince you that there are many, many people in this world who claim to have an intellectual understanding about God in their mind but do not have a relationship with God in their heart!

After you have enjoyed a relationship with God you can listen to a commentator on the news discussing Christianity and after a few sentences it starts to become obvious to you…. This person has learned some information about God but it doesn’t appear to have made it from their mind to there inner being. They may be spouting intellectual facts but you would never make the mistake of thinking that they “love God with all their heart, soul and strength”.

Hoe about you? Do you simply acknowledge God in your mind… or is there something more deep, and profound, about your relationship with him? Is it simply mental or is it something more?

When the Bible uses the word heart it is almost never talking about the organ that distributes blood through the body. In fact, there are close to 900 references to our “heart” in the Bible and I went down through them in a concordance and didn’t see a single one that was talking about the blood pumper. I don’t think God borrowed the word “heart” from this organ in the body…. I think the word heart meant what it meant, and we borrowed it to describe this organ because this organ seemed most like what the definition of the word already meant.

The Greek word for heart in the New Testament is “Kardia” (sound familiar?) Yet each time it’s used, it’s not taking about our blood pumper.

So what is it. When the Bible talks about your heart… what is it referring to?

Even when the Bible talks about the heart of the earth or the heart of the sea… it means what is way down in the center. And so it is with you… When Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all your heart he wasn’t talking about the surface of your mind. He meant you are to love God with the core of your being. Your love for God is to come from the very center of your soul.

According to the Bible (not science or reason) there is a part of your being that reaches far deeper than your mind. Your actions… your deepest motivations don’t stem from your mind… they come out of the center of your being… your heart.

Proverbs 4:23 Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.

Ecclesiastes 10:2 The hearts of the wise lead them to do right, and the hearts of the foolish lead them to do evil. (TLB)

This is a bit odd isn’t it? When you studied human anatomy in school, or if you took a psychology course in college, or in any of the science classes you have ever taken you probably didn’t have one test question asking you to describe the “heart” of humanity as separate from all the other aspects of what is means to be a person.

Yet God uses the word in scripture more than 800 times. When God is trying to communicate with us about our connection with him (or lack thereof)… this is the idea He chooses to try to get the concept across to us.

God wants us to understand that from His perspective, he looks right beyond our body language… he pays very little attention to what we say is true about our selves. He isn’t even remotely impressed with what we have worked out as our excuses for living the way we do… or not living the way we should.

He doesn’t even stop at the seething mass of wayward thoughts that we call our mind. He doesn’t need to reason with our feeble efforts to explain our actions.

We’ll get to the good news soon… but let’s pause a bit on the bad news. It matters little who you say you are or think you are on the outside. God isn’t gauging your sincerity by those things anyway. He’s already way past the normal indicators that we use to measure ourselves and each other. He’s already deep inside the core of your being, determining what you intents really are… exposing the motives deep inside that drive the actions on the outside. 1 Cor. says He “will bring to light what is hidden in darkness“.

God’s not interested in stirring up our darkest inner motivations just to punish us, or to embarrass us. God’s all about transformation. He’s in there rooting around in our heart to bring the sinfulness to the surface so it can be cleaned, washed, transformed.

Jeremiah 17:9 “ The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it? (NKJV) ..apparently God can…

I’ve discovered in my own life that just because I’m saying the right words on the outside it doesn’t mean I’m not about to have a “spiritual heart attack” on the inside. Jesus described it this way:

Matthew 15:8 " 'These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go for some tests and someone would put us on a spiritual treadmill and say… you know you’re puffing pretty hard with very little spiritual exertion… you may have some heart problems on the inside…. Whoa, here’s a place where your heart is out of rhythm… or my you have some blockage right here… or say you’ve had a mild infarction… part of your heart muscle seems to be dead.

In fact, that’s what the Holy Spirit is trying to do in each one of us…. “Hello, you’ve got some blockage in here.” But just as we often do on a physical level… we ignore the symptoms… imagining that they will improve on their own. Most of us could do with some spiritual “open heart surgery.” The Israelites had to have “heart surgery”….

Ezekiel 11:19 And I will give them singleness of heart and put a new spirit within them. I will take away their hearts of stone and give them tender hearts instead, (NLT)

Maybe you already got a new heart, but you’ve allowed it to get all clogged up: That’s exactly where David was…. God chose him.. He walked closely with God. He allowed little things to creep in. God came along “bringing to light what was hidden in darkness and exposing the motives of David's heart…” and David responded:

In many religions today if you even came to realize that you had a spiritual heart problem there would be little or nothing you could do about it… That’s not so with the God of Abraham Isaac, and Jacob. Not the case with the Creator of the World… the King of the Universe…Our Savior had a specific task to accomplish and it was a heart- related task:

Isaiah 61:1 The Spirit of GOD, the Master, is on me because GOD anointed me. He sent me to preach good news to the poor, heal those with hearts that are broken, Announce freedom to all captives, pardon all prisoners.