Heart of Faith: Conclusion

Don’t live in your head.

Be on guard against simplistic reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. Yes, Jeremiah 17:9 says that “the heart is desperately wicked” in most English translations. Hebrew thinking is the antithesis of legalistic semantic wrangling. A fair translation in the context would be “consciousness” instead of “heart.” That’s because the context condemns reliance on human capability and turning your consciousness from obeying the Lord. Jeremiah works from the assumption that the mind and flesh are inseparable, but that the sense of self cannot be restricted to the mind alone, and that your heart can decide it will follow moral truth, dragging the flesh along behind.

Use your mind, but don’t trust it. Sure, when it comes to developing and following routines, the mind is great. It saves energy and resources when you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. But by the same token, your heart must keep an eye on things, looking down on the mental operations from the lofty perch next to God’s heart. It is for the heart to realize when something in the context has changed that demands the mind shift gears appropriately.

Much of our modern social confusion about moral questions starts with a sneaky trick, in which the activist or advocate refuses to address more fundamental questions of what constitutes good morals. So you’ll often confront condemnations that presume you already agree with the underlying moral ground. And we have been conditioned to respond without going back and checking those moral assumptions. “Everybody knows,” they say. Thus, a vast territory of hard wiring in our human nature is ignored or outright condemned without a fair consideration of whether we can even do anything about it. We are held accountable to an artificial and impossible standard. Of course, the purpose is to make you feel self-revulsion and remain helpless before the onslaught of manipulative propaganda.

False guilt is a very powerful disabler.

Most of the time it’s pointless to acknowledge, much less engage, such evil. When possible, we who walk in Christ by our hearts will simply bypass the whole noisy riot. But there is nothing wrong with analyzing these things from a pure heart. This requires that you reject first and foremost the entire range of Western Civilization and all the moral baggage that comes with it. I don’t mean that we should stop living with modern conveniences simply because they come from a decadent materialistic society. We accept what is; all things are tools for His glory, but making Him glorious includes how we handle propaganda.

In your own heart, at least, be aware of the truth. Your flesh is what it is — fallen and unguided by moral truth. Your intellect is part of that. What makes for good logic may have nothing to do with moral truth, but don’t buy into the nonsense that your mind is inherently good or bad. It’s just flesh and acts according to its nature. Thoughts are the product of this raw and untamed nature.

What our society condemns as racist or sexist thoughts are simply thoughts. If your mind is not in charge, then it really isn’t a big deal. There’s no need for frantic efforts to keep a magnifying glass on every suspicious nerve impulse traversing your brain. Truth? Racism is a highly conditioned response to the fundamental human need to spend most of our time with our own extended family. Sexism is a highly conditioned response to the very hard-wired recognition that male and female are not interchangeable in most contexts. Frankly, most of the problems arise from a perverted social mythology that preaches heathen moral values.

It does no good to inflict shame on yourself simply because something in your flesh desires evil. That’s not the same as saying there is no evil in you, but that the proper way to handle things is not how the vast majority of Westerners do it. Western mythology makes no room for the existence of your heart-mind, and denigrates God’s love and mercy as the grudging provision for weaklings. Thus, the desperate attempts at controlling the mind and all the various thoughts, with the demand you permit some outside force to do it for you. It’s the wrong force. God doesn’t work that way.

Solomon was reputed the wisest man in human history. His mind seemed boundless. Yet for all his great understanding, it didn’t keep him from acting foolishly (1 Kings 11:1-13) in the long run, and he passed that folly on to his designated heir. There was room for repentance; that was the whole point in the sacrificial ritual system. Holiness is measured as the desire of your heart, not whether you can compel your flesh to perform accordingly. But Solomon’s loyalty was divided, and he couldn’t bring himself back far enough to repent. That didn’t invalidate the wise advice in his writings, but served instead to prove that real wisdom is not in the mind, but the heart — reverence for the Lord.

The oft-repeated biblical phrase, “purify your heart,” is a figure of speech. Perhaps it would better translate for us as “clarify your commitments.” You have to live there in your heart in order to discern it. It’s not a question of nifty little exercises (implying control by the intellect) that help you move your consciousness into your heart. It’s more a question of teaching your mind to recognize something that already exists. The pace and manner of change is between you and God. Your sense of awareness may never change all that much for you, but the content will surely follow a new path. With that changed content comes an awareness of a powerful necessity, a drive that is greater than anything you could experience any other way.

This is what we mean by a heart of faith.