Burning Heart; Changing Life

And then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight. And they said to one another, “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:31-32, NKJV)

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“Why in the world would you want to do that?” The young man’s question was a demand. He was a brilliant technician who had sacrificed a great many hours of sleep to experience and know precisely how it all worked and what the results would be for just about every variable.

The older man let his breath quickly out his nose, then opened his mouth. His chest expanded to pull in a large volume. In a calm, almost bemused tone he responded, “It doesn’t matter to me what makes sense to you. I know what I want and you can either take my money or tell me you aren’t interested.”

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It is human nature to make a great many decisions based on something other than reason and social custom. It is a standard delusion to imagine what what makes sense to you must be somehow universal. The vast lore of scientific and historical knowledge of how this world works could never cover all the bases; together they cannot possibly answer all the questions. Human need cannot be quantified that way.

Once you become conscious of this and embrace it as moral truth, it becomes a lot easier to suffer the arrogance of people utterly convinced that their way is the ultimate answer to all mankind’s ills.

If you are not in a state of flux on at least a few things in your life, then you have already died. It is the nature of childhood to explore things not yet experienced. Yet each child will unconsciously foreclose on a lot of possibilities for any number of reasons. This does not make them inferior. As we age, we tend to shut the door on more things, but that’s so we can pay more attention to things that do call us onward.

Adding in a conscious awareness of the heart and the moral sphere of consideration adds more complications. It does not reduce tension; it makes tension natural and normal. We stop wasting effort on vanquishing tensions and seek to build our own peace internally. We serve to personify peace in that sense. It’s not that everyone will simply buy into our sense of peace, but that their tension has little effect on us.

Even something as quantifiable as the computer technology so very important to my ministry calling, it still must yield to the variability of human questing. If computers become the masters, we are doomed. They are the servants, second in line behind the intellect that must also submit before the moral authority of the heart.

Don’t ignore your convictions; God plants them in the nerve clusters of your heart’s independent nervous system. There’s a mind there with its own logic, and the people of the Ancient Near East took it quite literally that the heart was an entirely different faculty from the brain. It’s the part of us that can know God.