Serializing the draft of my next book under the working title “Heart of Faith.”
Smashwords requires an advertising blurb for each book. They want a long and short version.
Short: Your heart is not simply a metaphor of feelings, but a genuine sensory organ. It also has its own parallel neuron network and even a brain. Biological science can tell you that much, but for Christians, the Bible revealed long ago that your heart is the only part of you capable of hearing God’s voice.
Long:It’s a tragedy of Western culture that relegates the heart to a mere metaphor of human emotion. It’s the only culture that does that; every other civilization seems to have understood that the heart is quite literally the seat of a higher level of understanding. Recently scientists have discovered that the heart has a sensory field more powerful than the brain, connected to a parallel neuron network of its own. It’s not simply a figure of speech when the Bible refers to the heart as the one place where you can hear the voice of God. He doesn’t speak to the intellect, so if you don’t have your heart attuned to His voice, you can’t hear Him at all.
Preface
It is impossible to write this book without at times stepping into a first-person narrative. The very nature of what I hope to accomplish requires that you understand the intensely personal nature of God’s truth.
God is a Person, not some impersonal force out there in the cosmos. Further, all truth is a reflection of His character. There is no objective body of factual truth except in the wild imagination of Western rationalists. The Bible says flatly that God can remake reality on-the-fly and that all things are wholly subject to His whim. When He decides to let us see Him doing it, we call it “miracle” — otherwise we would never know the difference. All of reality remains entirely dependent on His attention, and Scripture affirms His interest does not wax and wane like ours does.
While there is a vast body of common experience in Christian faith, there is plenty that is of necessity entirely unique to the individual. The Western reflex to emphasize the common can literally smother the unique. Even Western liberalism trades one set of enforced conformity for another against Western conservatism, so this is not a question of those competing philosophies. The Bible is neither, but a wholly different kind of approach to thinking.
That’s what I aim to show you in this book, but I can only tell you what I have learned and experienced first-hand. You are bound to find that some of this simply cannot apply to you. It is between God and you. God makes His own path in each human soul.
