It's All About the Heart

It is a common thing, whenever my wife and I make observations about the human condition, for one of us to utter the phrase "It's all about the heart," at which point the other will nod in agreement, and this usually concludes the matter. I'm going to try to relay precisely what we mean when we say this.

God talks extensively about the heart in His word. In 1 Samuel 16:7, it says that "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." What do you think he is looking for? Good intentions? The right attitude? When God looks at a person's heart, what does he want to see?

First of all, notice that in Deuteronomy 5:29 that God, after God had given the 10 commandments to the Israelites and the people agreed to enter into the Sinai covenant, the LORD says 

Deuteronomy 5:39

Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!

The key point to take away from this scripture is that God wants people to obey Him so that he can bless them for it. Remember that God promised great blessings for the nation of Israel if they would diligently keep all of His commandments. The Old Testament chronicles their rebellious behavior and all of the pain that they brought on themselves as a result. When God looks into our hearts, he wants to see exactly what he proclaimed that he wanted to see in the hearts of the Israelites: He wants to see a heart that is “inclined” towards Him in such a way that we will keep His commandments and fear Him.

It explains in Hebrews 8 that the whole purpose of the new covenant, which Jesus Christ mediated through his sacrifice, was to give people such a heart:

Hebrews 8:6-8

For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. But God found fault with the people...

Here it clearly identifies the people as the problem with the first covenant, and the people are the very same problem that God Himself revealed to Moses at the giving of the law, which we saw in Deuteronomy. The above verses in Hebrews concerning the differences between the old and new covenants go on to quote Jeremiah concerning the new covenant:

Jeremiah 31:31-33

"The time is coming," declares the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts..."

God reiterates here that the new covenant will be different in that the people will have the heart to keep it. It says that it won't be like the old covenant, because the people, not having the right heart, broke that covenant.

The Pharisees and Sadducees, men who had spent their entire lives studying God's law and considered themselves to be holding up their end of the old covenant, asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was. This is what we are to learn from the Pharisees and Sadducees: they were a people of whom God said in Isaiah 29:13, "they honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is made up only of rules taught by men." They followed the letter of the law, according to the physical things, but they did not follow the law with their hearts – that is, though they kept the law outwardly, they did not truly love God or their neighbors. Jesus put it succinctly in Matthew 23:27, saying to them “you are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.” Jesus told them what the greatest commandment was:

Matthew 22:37-40

Jesus replied, " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Let’s observe also the following verse from the same discussion, in which Jesus revealed to them how had been neglecting the greatest commandments:

Matthew 23:23

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.”

It says that “justice, mercy and faithfulness” are more important points of the law than tithing on the spices that you grow. This example is used because spices are not generally grown in large quantities, so to offer a tenth of the spices that you grow to God is considered being meticulous to properly observe the commandments about tithing. However, notice exactly what is being said: that you should have “practiced the latter,” being the more important points, “without neglecting the former,” being the minor point of tithing on spices. Jesus is saying that we should be trying to diligently and meticulously keep the law, but that we also need to pay careful attention to keeping the overarching theme of God’s law, which is love. The Pharisees and Sadducees had the former, but lacked the latter because their hearts were not in it.

Our hope, as we saw in Isaiah, is that God will write His laws on our hearts and minds so that we can keep the law both externally and internally. Ezekiel was given a very eye-opening prophecy about the new covenant, where God said the following through him:

Ezekiel 36:26-27

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Those who enter into the new covenant are promised a new heart and a new spirit. We have established that the new heart is what God says we need in order to keep his laws correctly. The heart that people naturally have is one of stone - it's hard, cold, and incapable of growth. God intends to give us a heart of flesh - one that has feeling and can grow in such a way that we will be compelled to keep his laws and to do so with the right attitude and intentions. This is how we can know that we have the Holy Spirit in us: if, over time, we are changing our way of thinking so that we can better obey God by keeping his commandments with sincerity and love. We cannot come to true, heartfelt repentance without “Godly sorrow:”

2 Corinthians 7:10

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. See what this Godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.

This scripture establishes the difference between what we can do on our own, which comes from “worldly sorrow," versus what we can do with “Godly sorrow,” which comes from God’s Holy Spirit. The process of receiving the heart of flesh is shown here to be not all at once, but over time. It’s like God is chipping away the heart of stone and replacing it a little bit at a time with flesh. It begins when God works with us through the Holy Spirit before we are baptized and it continues as God works in us through the Holy Spirit after baptism. Paul highlighted the changes in how we think and feel that come as a result of this process. Examining the previous verse, we see that with our new heart we become earnest and eager to be clean from our sin. We gain “indignation,” which is Godly anger caused by something that is unjust. We are to receive a longing for God’s righteousness to be brought to the earth, concern for the evils that occur, and “readiness to see justice done.” The “worldly sorrow” that is in a heart of stone cannot produce these things, and, therefore, leads to death. Only with a new heart can we begin to see the world as God does – a place of injustice and lawlessness which desperately needs God’s help on the full scale.

Let’s examine further what kind of heart God is intending to give us through his new covenant. Consider that God's law is a law of love. As we saw earlier in Matthew 23, Jesus said that every command that God recorded in the scriptures is vested in the two greatest commandments: love for God and love for our neighbors. Jesus quotes these two commandments from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, demonstrating that he is not insinuating that love is more important than the law, but rather that love is God’s law and always has been. He is saying that if we examine all the laws that God has set forth, we will find that each one of them depicts either how to show our love for God or how to show our love for fellow man. 1 John 4:8 says "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." It is no wonder then that the instrument that we require in order to truly keep God's commandments is a heart of flesh, one that is capable of the kind of love that God requires in His law. God sacrificed His only son out of love for us, that we may be His future children. Such a selfless heart as we require can only come from our Creator, and this is the kind of heart that God Himself has.

When we say “it’s all about the heart,” we mean that every choice that we make boils down to whether we are acting with a Godly heart or with a worldly heart. Everything we do and say comes from the heart, for "out the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" (Matthew 12:24), so how much more do our thoughts and actions reflect our heart! The worldly heart is selfish and deceitful, whereas the Godly heart yields love for God by obedience to His commandments and love for others in every way. We are all born with a worldly heart, but “[God] is patient with [us], not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9) so that we may receive the only kind of heart that will endure forever in God’s kingdom.