The Biblical Heart

“Wow! That guy really spoke from his heart!” I heard this comment while listening to a young speaker that gave a five or ten minute devotional one night. I won’t go into detail about what I think about people giving overly complementary remarks as far as short (and often shallow) devotionals go, but I will speak a little on this idea of “speaking from the heart” or “loving with your heart”. First of all, the idea, at face value, irritates me. I hate to resort to definitions in any type of writings I do (I suppose that “blogs” [though I hate the name] are not the place to be worrying about grammatical etiquette and properness), but dictionary.com defines the heart to be “the chambered muscular organ in vertebrates that pumps blood received from the veins into the arteries, thereby maintaining the flow of blood through the entire circulatory system.” Those phrases previously stated irritate me because they don’t make any sense. I believe they were originally meant to be used as metonymical statements, but now it seems that many do not understand the biblical idea of the heart. The first statement about the heart that comes to mind is Matthew 22:37, “Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” Another that comes to mind is Acts 8:37 when Philip said that the Ethiopian must believe with all of his heart. Believe with all of my heart? With that organ that pumps blood? Obviously this is not the case. He’s speaking of the mind! That is what I’ve always learned and always thought. Paul said in Romans 7:25 that he served the laws of God with his mind. We’re commanded to have the mind of Christ (Phil. 2:5), and have the laws of God written on our minds (Heb. 8:10). It seems obvious, but now let’s go back to Matthew 22:37. If they are the same thing biblically (the heart and the mind) then why are they spoken of separately in the same verse? The best I can come up with is that they are the same, but that Jesus separates them in this passage to strengthen His point that we must love God with everything we have. So when Acts 2:37 says that the people were “cut to their hearts”, it doesn’t (obviously) mean literally sliced open, but rather their minds were convicted. When David said, “Thy word have I hidden in my hear that I might not sin against Thee” he had memorized what God had told him. So go ahead: use all that emotional language you want and say that people are really “speaking their heart”. But at the same time, know what it means.