What You Feel vs What You Believe
You’ve heard it said before, you should “follow your heart” to have real happiness or fulfillment, or even know what you’re doing is right. You’ve probably experienced a time or two when this seemed to work out well – you weren’t sure what decision to make, but as you searched your feelings, you found which way felt or seemed best to you, and you went for it. Chances are, though, you’ve also had that turn around on you, when a moment of following your heart didn’t exactly work out.
Our concept of “the heart” in today’s world is completely tied to our experience of emotion. What we “feel,” is our true self, our truth for the world, and we are told we must follow it. But if you’re reading this devotional, you might know where I’m headed with this. So let’s get there.
I looked up potential origins for the phrase and found two important links. One was to a soup, salad and sandwich shop called, “Follow Your Heart.” This is important because now I’m hungry. The other, more helpful reference, was from Shakespear’s Hamlet, where Polonius gives this advice to his son who is about to leave home. Polonius’s advice wasn’t an admonishment to follow the whimsey of our emotional roller-coaster, but rather, he was using a cliché as his son was leaving. Is it possible an entire worldview began with a cliché in a play? I suppose so. I don’t know when “follow your heart” became the mantra of entire generations, but here we are. And I’ll venture to say we’re worse off because of this very thinking. Or rather, this very feeling.
What should be our true source for direction in life, the Bible, has a few things to say about living this way. Jeremiah 17:7 and 9 says, “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence… 9 The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” Not exactly a ringing endorsement for allowing the heart to direct your life.
So what are we supposed to do instead? The opposite of following is leading, and that’s what we’re supposed to do! King Solomon wrote in Proverbs 23:19, “My child, listen and be wise: Keep your heart on the right course.” To keep, in this instance, is a verb, an action. We are called to actively lead our hearts rather than follow them! But how do we, imperfect and sinful people as we are, properly lead an already wayward heart? An old counselor friend, Tina, used to say it well: you gotta know what you know what you know. Said another way, lead your heart based on what you know to be true, based on what you believe. Belief is the foundation of who we are, it’s our worldview, it shapes our very understanding of anything and everything.
Look at the disciples and all they endured and sacrificed. They left their homes, they travelled the countryside, they abandoned all comforts because of what they believed about Jesus. Peter said it in Matthew 16:16, “You are the Messiah,[d] the Son of the living God.” His belief changed everything about how he lived. If he had followed his heart, he would have been back on the fishing boat in an instant, and back at his home on the weekends. The story of his life would have been much different, and not at all useful for the Kingdom of God. But instead, Jesus chose to use Peter as a foundation to build the Church. And all this because Peter knew what he believed, and lived his life accordingly.
Today, what decisions need to be made in your life, and how do you plan to make them? Instead of following your heart, today, ask God to help you LEAD it, relying what you know to be true, based on what God’s Word says. This is following what you believe, rather than what you feel.
