“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”Hebrews 4:12 KJV
There is a whole part of your life that nobody on earth has ever seen.
Your spouse has never seen it, your children have never seen it, the folks who sit beside you at church have never seen it, and most of the time you do not look at it very closely yourself.
It is the running commentary that goes on under the surface while you are doing chores or answering emails and nodding along in a conversation.
What you said out loud at the table last night is a matter of record.
What you were thinking while you said it is known to exactly two persons, you and God, and only one of the two has been paying full attention.
So the question worth sitting with for a while is a plain one.
What are the thoughts of your heart?
The world has an answer ready before the question is finished.
Follow your heart.
It is printed on coffee mugs and painted on the walls of little girls' bedrooms and repeated at graduations as if it were wisdom.
It may be the most anti scriptural sentence in common use, because the Bible says the opposite as plainly as it says anything.
"He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered" (Proverbs 28:26).
Jeremiah went further.
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9).
Notice that the prophet did not say the heart is occasionally mistaken or needs a little training.
He said it is deceitful above all things, which means it will lie to you more skillfully than anyone you have ever met, and it will do it in your own voice, so that the lie feels like your deepest conviction.
A person who follows a heart like that is following a guide that has already been described as the worst liar in the world.
Someone commented on one of my notes recently with a thought that sounds gentler than "follow your heart" but lands in the same ditch.
The idea, roughly, was that our feelings are the Holy Spirit inviting us into reflection.
I understand why that is attractive, because it dresses up our moods in spiritual clothing and makes every emotional reaction feel like a message from God.
It could not be further from the truth.
The Holy Spirit is a person, the third person of the Godhead, and He speaks through the written word He inspired.
Jesus said of Him, "he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak" (John 16:13).
Your feelings, on the other hand, rise out of the same heart Jeremiah just described.
They are selfish by nature, they change with sleep and hormones and whether somebody hurt your pride that morning, and they were never given the authority to speak for God.
John told us to "believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1).
If we are commanded to test spirits that claim to speak from outside us, we should be far slower to baptize the ones that rise from inside us.
The Lord Jesus told us what actually comes up out of the heart when it is left to itself.
"For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies" (Matthew 15:19).
Put evil thoughts first in that list on purpose, because that is the order He used.
Before the murder there was the thought of the murder, and before the adultery there was the look, and He taught that the look was already the sin.
"But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" (Matthew 5:28).
We tend to treat the thought as the harmless part, the part that only becomes sin once it gets into our hands or out of our mouths.
Christ did not treat it that way.
Solomon wrote, "For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he" (Proverbs 23:7), and that is the verse most people never want to hear all the way through.
You are what you think when nobody is watching.
The person your family sees is the edited version.
That brings me to Simon of Samaria, because his story settles the matter of whether God holds us responsible for our thoughts.
Simon had been a sorcerer and he professed faith and was baptized, and then he watched Peter and John lay hands on people and saw the Holy Ghost given, and something moved inside him that nobody in the room could see.
He wanted that power, and he offered money for it.
Peter did not answer the offer, he answered the heart behind it.
"But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity" (Acts 8:20-23).
Read verse 22 again slowly.
Repent of the thought of thine heart.
Peter called a thought wickedness, and he told a man to repent of it and pray to be forgiven for it, and he did this over something that had not yet been carried out.
Simon had not bought anything.
He had only wanted to, and the wanting was enough to put him in the gall of bitterness.
If the Bible ended there we would still have to conclude that a thought can be a sin requiring repentance, and that God reads the thought as clearly as He would read the deed.
Most of us have never once knelt down and repented of something we only thought.
We repent of the words that got out and the things we did, and we let the thoughts slide as if they were weather.
Acts 8 says they are not weather.
They are ours, and we answer for them.
David understood this when he charged his son with the throne, telling him to serve God with a perfect heart "for the LORD searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the thoughts" (1 Chronicles 28:9).
The word of God is described the same way, as "a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart," and the next verse closes every exit.
"Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do" (Hebrews 4:12-13).
Nobody on earth heard what you thought about your sister in law during that phone call, or what went through your mind when your husband forgot again, or where your imagination wandered when the house was finally still.
God heard all of it in real time, and He did not need you to say it out loud.
To understand why the war inside us feels the way it does, it helps to see how the Bible describes what a person is.
Paul prayed that "your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thessalonians 5:23).
Three parts, one person, made in the image of a triune God.
The body is the house you live in.
The soul is the seat of your mind and will and emotions, the you that thinks and chooses and feels.
The spirit is the deepest part, the inner man, the real you that God deals with directly.
At salvation something happened to that inner part that did not happen to the body.
Paul described it as "the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ" (Colossians 2:11).
The old body of sin was cut away from who you are, spiritually, permanently, without a knife and without a surgeon.
Peter spoke of "the salvation of your souls" (1 Peter 1:9) as an accomplished thing, while the body still waits its turn, groaning along with the rest of creation "waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Romans 8:23).
This is why a saved person can be genuinely saved and still have thoughts they are ashamed of.
The inner man has been made new and delights in God's law.
The flesh has not been changed at all, and it still lives in the same house and still gets a vote.
Paul described the fight from the inside.
"For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members" (Romans 7:22-23).
And to the Galatians, "For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would" (Galatians 5:17).
Nobody is going to escape this war on this side of the grave, and nobody should be surprised to find it raging in her own head on a Tuesday afternoon.
The question is which side you are feeding.
That is what makes the old saying so useful, even though it did not come from a preacher and I am in no way recommending the man whose name is usually attached to it.
It is often credited to Emerson, though nobody is really sure where it started, and wherever it came from it is true.
Sow a thought and you reap an action
Sow an act and you reap a habit
Sow a habit and you reap a character
Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
Scripture said it first and said it with more authority.
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting" (Galatians 6:7-8).
A bitter thought entertained on Monday becomes a bitter remark on Thursday, and a bitter remark repeated for a year becomes a bitter woman, and a bitter woman raises children who learned bitterness at her table.
Nobody plans to become that.
It gets planted one thought at a time, in the one place nobody else can see.
So the thoughts of your heart are not something to shrug at or hide behind.
They are ground to be worked.
Solomon put it as a command.
"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life" (Proverbs 4:23).
Paul told the Corinthians what keeping it looks like in practice,
"Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Every thought, taken captive, marched to Christ and made to answer to Him.
That is hard, deliberate work, and it has to be done again tomorrow.
He gave the Philippians the other half of it, the sowing that replaces the weeds.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things" (Philippians 4:8).
You will not be able to do any of this by following your heart, because your heart is the thing that needs watching.
It has to be done by bringing the heart to God and letting Him do the searching, the way David did when he prayed,
"Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).
That prayer assumes the wicked way might be in there.
It assumes you cannot find it on your own.
It asks the only One who can see it to point it out, and it asks Him to do something about it.
So ask yourself, honestly, tonight, what the thoughts of your heart have been today?
Ask what you were really thinking when you smiled and said it was fine?
Ask what you have been turning over in your mind about a person you have never confronted?
Ask where your imagination goes when it is left alone?
Then, if you find something there that Peter would have called wickedness, do what he told Simon to do.
Repent of it.
Pray God that the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.
He has already promised what He will do with a heart that is brought to Him that way.
He will cleanse it, and He will lead it in the way everlasting.
"Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer" (Psalm 19:14).
Biblical Womanhood
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