Don't Just "Follow Your Heart"

The advice is often given to just follow your heart, or go with where your feelings lead you. “I always believed that when you follow your heart or your gut, when you really follow the things that feel great to you, you can never lose….” – RihannaThe underlying assumption of this approach is that inclinations and impressions we get in our heart are a trustworthy source of direction in our lives. In Christian circles, this advice to follow your heart is often prefaced with a call to “pray about it,” but in the end, simply do or believe what feels right. While this is an appealing and popular idea, mainly because it can give a person freedom or justification to simply do whatever pleases them, it can be a very dangerous proposition. The reason why is that our hearts can be, and very often are, wrong.Our Hearts Can’t Always Be TrustedFor the person who has never trusted in Jesus, the Bible warns us that their heart is a very untrustworthy source of solid direction.Jeremiah 17:9 The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?This is talking about more than our dreams, intuitions, or what our emotions want. That’s how we think of the “heart” in today’s world. In the Bible, the “heart” is the whole inner self that drives your choices and attitudes. It includes not just what you feel, but also what and how you think, what you value, your conscience, your inclinations, what you desire and what you choose - the whole inner you. Your heart involves your mind, your will, and your emotions. It is the control center of your being. Jeremiah 17:9 is a warning that our inner mechanism for making decisions is pretty jacked up. Your heart will lead you down a deceitful path that could be very destructive.Mark 7:19-23 Food doesn’t go into your heart, but only passes through the stomach and then goes into the sewer.” (By saying this, he declared that every kind of food is acceptable in God’s eyes.) And then he added, “It is what comes from inside that defiles you. For from within, out of a person’s heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these vile things come from within; they are what defile you.”Jesus says that the human heart is the source of all kinds of sin. We carry wickedness around within us. This is why we shouldn’t follow our hearts, but question our hearts.Ecclesiastes 9:3 The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live.Clearly, God warns us not to simply trust our hearts, because they are full of deceit and wickedness. The reason why our hearts are so depraved is that every human being is born with a sinful nature that corrupts everything about them. This doesn’t mean that no one has ever done a good deed in their life, but that even the good things we do are tainted with the stain of sin. And because of this sin, our hearts are infected and broken and can easily lead us astray. This means that the advice to simply follow your heart is foolish because a sinful heart cannot be trusted.Romans 3:9-12 No one is righteous—not even one. No one is truly wise; no one is seeking God. All have turned away; all have become useless. No one does good, not a single one.On God’s scale, no good deed me