Follow Your Heart?

If ever there was a tidbit of pop-psychology that twenty-first century Americans embraced, it’s this:  Follow your heart. Be true to yourself.  Pursue your own dream.  Perish the thought that you should feel obliged to act in any way to fulfill someone else’s wishes for you!  You want to sing along with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way!”

“Follow your heart” is an unassailable creed of contemporary culture; it’s beyond the reach of any question, much less critique.  In today’s world, it’s simply “right.”  And if you challenge this popular ortho­doxy, you’re either foolish or dangerous—or both.

Enter Jon Bloom, author of the book, Don’t Follow Your Heart:  God’s Ways Are Not Your Ways (free download at desiringgod.org).  Now there’s a title sure to irk all the motivational speakers and self-help gurus.  And yet, if you’re ready to shrug his message off, be careful!

After all, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desper­ately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).  In fact, Bloom contends that our biggest problems in life are heart problems, and they often occur because we follow our heart and not God’s.

Our hearts whisper to us, urging us to look (again and again) into the mirror and imagine, “I am the center of reality.”  What’s more, “My heart likes to think the best of me and the worst of others.”  But this is madness.  The Great Physician gives an honest diagnosis of our soul-disease: “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:19).

Bloom confronts the self-centered:  “Our hearts were never designed to be followed, but to be led.”  This secular society will say your heart is an inner compass pointing toward your true north.  But, “If our hearts are compasses, they are Jack Sparrow compasses.  They don’t tell us the truth; they just tell us what we want.”  “No, our hearts will not save us.  We need to be saved from our hearts.”

So as you consider your identity and calling, don’t look within—look upward.  Jesus is your good shepherd (John 10:11).  “Listen to his voice in his word and follow him (John 10:27).”  Fix your eyes on Christ and pursue his heart:  he will lead you to life! (John 14:6).