The world is always telling you to “follow your heart.” Countless ads, rom-coms, and bestselling memoirs show us the great things that supposedly await if we follow our hearts. What the world doesn’t tell you is that following your heart isn’t necessarily as innocent as changing the color of your hair, splurging on ice cream, or asking that girl across the room out.
Instead, following your heart can lead you into debt, addiction, regret, and trouble of all kinds. In other words, following your heart is a surefire way to fall into sin.
Of course, God’s Word has plenty to say about the folly of following your heart — and trusting your own mind. Jeremiah 17:9 tells us, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Proverbs 28:26 doesn’t hold back when it declares, “Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.” Ecclesiastes 9:3b says that “the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.”
What's the consequence of following our hearts? The Apostle Paul explains:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Romans 1:21-32 (ESV)
Why does the Bible tell us that our hearts are this way? Our sinful nature extends to our hearts and minds.
Jon Bloom writes at Desiring God:
Your heart has likely said things today that you would not wish to repeat. I know mine has. My heart tells me that all of reality ought to serve my desires. My heart likes to think the best of me and worst of others — unless those others happen to think well of me; then they are wonderful people. But if they don’t think well of me, or even if they just disagree with me, well then, something is wrong with them. And while my heart is pondering my virtues and others’ errors, it can suddenly find some immoral or horribly angry thought very attractive.
“Looking inside our hearts does not give us limitless freedom so much as a bad case of claustrophobia,” says professor and author Thaddeus Williams. “Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that our hearts are fascinating. But compared with following the heart of God, our hearts hold all the thrill of a prison cell.”
Related: Sunday Thoughts: The Danger of 'You Do You'
That’s the secret. Instead of following our hearts, we should be after God’s heart. If we’re trusting in Him and seeking His glory in our lives, we’ll be less likely to give in to the temptation to follow our hearts.
Scripture has plenty of admonition for us to trust in the Lord over our fickle, depraved hearts:
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
Jeremiah 17:7 (ESV)
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
Proverbs 3:5-6 (ESV)
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 6:33 (ESV)
“That idea of God being the center of it all, that God being the glorious One who we are called and created to glorify, that's what worship is, right?” says Kurt Petersheim. “To glorify him. That is not incongruent with your good. In fact, I believe it's two sides of the same coin that God's glory and Your good work hand in hand, that if you will glorify God, if you will give your life to this.”
God didn’t create us to follow our hearts. He created us to follow Him, and from that will flow all the good things that we often think following our hearts will bring us. That’s what brings Him glory and brings us His blessings. That’s what life is all about.
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