Follow Jesus, Not Your Heart

Photo by Amanda Franklin

“The heart is the most deceitful thing there is and desperately wicked. No one can really know how bad it is!” (Jeremiah 17:9 NLT).

The book of Jeremiah (named after the book’s main protagonist, the prophet Jeremiah) recounts a period in Israel’s history in the late seventh century BCE when the nation was on the cusp of being conquered by the new dominant Ancient Near Eastern power—the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Some 300 years earlier, the nation of Israel had split into two separate kingdoms, one in the north, which was actually called “Israel,” and one in the south, which was called Judah (from which we get the name “Jewish” in reference to this people group).

By the time we get to the story in Jeremiah, the Northern Kingdom of Israel had already been conquered a hundred or so years earlier by the Assyrian Empire. Having conquered the Assyrians, the Babylonians were now the proverbial “big kid on the block,” and were a clear threat to the demonstrably weaker nation of Judah.   

Nevertheless, Judah (at least the more privileged class within it) had fully embraced the idea that they represented God’s special people and enjoyed certain promises that God had made to them—promises that they understood guaranteed their peace and security. What they were much more reluctant to understand was that as God’s special people they were responsible to live in a certain fashion for the benefit of all, and there were consequences for failing to do so. This was a consistent message conveyed over the years to the former northern kingdom of Israel as well as the southern kingdom of Judah by God’s chosen spokespersons, his prophets. Israel didn’t listen and they were a kingdom no more. The matter would now come to a head for Judah.  

In the seventh chapter of Jeremiah, we are given a scene in which the prophet Jeremiah was told by God to stand in the Temple, located in the capital city of Jerusalem, to deliver a message. The Jerusalem Temple was at the very center of Judah’s society and served as the primary symbol of their identity as God’s people. The Temple is where God was thought to dwell—where heaven and earth met. Surely, the Temple, the city of Jerusalem, and the nation in total could not possibly be violated by a foreign invader such as Babylon.

But that is not what God instructed Jeremiah to say. Rather, Jeremiah was to proclaim these words from God:

“Even now, if you quit your evil ways, I will let you stay in your own land. But don’t be fooled by those who promise you safety simply because the Lord’s Temple is here. They chant, ‘The Lord’s Temple is here! The Lord’s Temple is here!’ But I will be merciful only if you stop your evil thoughts and deeds and start treating each other with justice. . . . Don’t be fooled into thinking that you will never suffer because the Temple is here. It’s a lie! Do you really think you can steal, murder, commit adultery, lie, and burn incense to Baal and all those other new gods of yours, and then come here and stand before me in my Temple and chant, ‘We are safe!’—only to go right back to all those evils again?” (Jeremiah 7:3–10 NLT).

In the ensuing chapters, God expresses his incredulity and hurt that his people refuse to listen to such warnings and return to him by doing what is right, which would serve their own well-being. But instead of heeding the truth and experience the life of flourishing that God promised, the people followed their own way—what seemed right to them. And, quite audaciously, they still thought they could experience the good that God desired to give to them.

If I had a quarter for every time I have heard the phrase, “follow your heart,” I would be a very rich man. Sometimes this idea is applied in fairly innocuous ways to indicate that, all things remaining equal, persons should exercise their own discernment best they can when making life decisions. However, all too often, the idea of following one’s heart is posited as the primary, if not only, means to determining what’s right for oneself. The problem with this is that one’s “heart”—one’s inner self—is an unreliable source of truth. Our hearts can lie to us.    

Further on in Jeremiah, following the proclamations of judgment, God does promise to eventually restore his people after they experience the consequences of their sinful ways. But in order for this restoration to happen in a full and lasting fashion, it necessarily requires God’s direct intervention to transform people’s hearts so that they may then understand and obey the truth (see Jeremiah 31:31–34).

The promise that God would act to change people from the inside out lies at the center of what the New Testament teaches about the significance of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection, and the subsequent work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who choose Christ. But the unreliability and deceptive nature of our hearts isn’t a problem that simply vanishes when one decides to become a Christian. The human capacity to deceive ourselves into believing that our way is right even when in defiance of God’s law remains a potential in the present life for all people.

So if your heart is leading you, you would do well to apply some skepticism. If what seems right to you is something God says is wrong—if following your heart means you are no longer following Jesus—then, as the story of Jeremiah tells us, you are on a sure path to disaster.