THE HEART IS THE THING – What is the Heart?

“ Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.”

Psalm 19:14

I once heard someone retort that “the construction of the heart cannot be seen on the face” and guess what my initial reaction to this assertion was? “Hmmmm!!!!!.”But over the years as I began to understand the activities of human beings clearly through studying of the scriptures and the underlying forces of the human behavior, I have come to agree strongly with this assertion. I use to wonder why Jesus Christ was always hard on the religious leaders of his days and yet spent most of his time with sinners and the ordinary segment of the society like tax collectors, fisher folks etc. But after reading and studying the scriptures I just came to one conclusion that, Jesus Christ hated the HYPOCRASY of the heart of these religious leaders. 

He once called them a whitewashed tomb in Mathew 23:27 – 28 (GNB) "How terrible for you, teachers of the Law and Pharisees! You hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look fine on the outside but are full of bones and decaying corpses on the inside. In the same way, on the outside you appear good to everybody, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and sins.” From this narrative you will notice that God is really interested in the attitude of our heart rather than the attitude we put up externally; man looks on the outside, but God looks on the inside - the heart.

But let us look at what the heart really is. If we talk about the heart, we are not in any way referring to that part of the body that pumps our blood and distributes oxygen to our body.

 The heart for the purpose of this narrative is the intangible part of our being, the real us, that is the center of our being and the bedrock of all our actions and inactions. The heart is that part of our being where every intention, character, purpose, desire, motives, thought, ideas and the likes are hatched and natured before they are unleashed. We are our hearts and our heart is us, I believe this is the part of our being that got corrupted through the disobedience of our first parent Adam and Eve. Before Eve chose to disobey God, she considered the idea of eating the fruit as well as it supposed purpose as suggested by the serpent in her heart first,

according to Genesis 3:6 (GNB) “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. Having desired to be wise like God, she reached for the fruit and eat it. It was this singular action that was sanctioned by her heart that brought bondage to the human race, conversely through our Lord Jesus Christ it will take the heart of a sinner to sanction another action to reverse the bondage and eventually bring salvation to the sinner according to Romans 10:9B (KJV)  “…………………………………….shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

The daily consideration of our hearts is what determines who we are and what we do; what we expose ourselves to is a clue to what is shaping our heart. From the narrative in the Garden of Eden, it was clear what the Serpent’s strategy was; the serpent’s aim was to gradually align the meditation of Eve’s heart to his deceptive suggestion and get man to turn against God. The heart is what processes our actions and everything that we do; it is the center of all human activities, everything that we see around us was all processed in the heart before it become a reality. The evil and the destruction we see in the world is just the physical manifestation of considerations in the heart of men. Satan’s main aim is to get our heart to be in line with his precept, then he is done with us; 

the battle we are engaging with the forces of darkness is the battle of who takes over the control of the human heart, that might probably explain why the media (films, news, documentary, drama, music, series etc) has become one of the key weapons Satan is using to have control of the human heart. What we see and hear continually becomes the considerations of our heart and the considerations of our heart defines who we are. The kinds of things we listen to and watch are very important; what kind of movies are we watching continually? What kind of music do we always listen to and what kind of friends do we keep around us?

 These are all clues to what the attitudes of our hearts are? It wasn’t for nothing that the Psalmist said in Psalm 1:1 (KJV) “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.” I have come to understand that mental knowledge of the scripture alone is not enough to unleash the grace and the power that is embedded in the word of God, but going beyond mental accent (memorization) of the scripture to meditating upon it is what brings us to that place of walking in the grace and the power of God. God, having giving Joshua a herculean task of leading His people to the promise land, commanded him not only to have a mental accent of the scripture, but to meditate on it so as to obey it, 

according to Joshua 1:8 (KJV)  “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.”  Psalm 1:2 - 3 also buttresses this truth - “But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” It is meditation that will imprint the word of God on our heart and cause us to obey it, and until the word of God begins to dominate our heart we will find it difficult to obey God’s word, 

probably that might explain why some Bible Knowledge teachers and believers know the scriptures, yet their lives are in contrast distinction to the scriptures. It is only when the word of God is inscribed on the tablet of our heart that we can unleash the grace to obey it. It is only when we allow the scriptures to dominant our heart that our usefulness will appear to all, according to 1Timothy 4:15 (KJV) “Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. “We must know that “Memorization is to the mind, whereas as meditation is to the heart”. Take note “The sins that we commit have already been conceived and natured in our heart, it is not a one off event”

What you continually expose yourself to puts you in one of the categories branded in Luke 8:4 -15: (1) Wayside hearted person (2) Rocky hearted person (3) Thorny hearted person (4) Fertile hearted person.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK WITH A SUB TOPIC -“THE WAYSIDE HEARTED PERSON”…………..