Reaching The Heart

I was listening to Tim Keller give a workshop on preaching to the heart on the way to work this week, and it made me think about what it means for something to reach our heart. He gives the example of a depressed teenage girl he counseled once, who could verbalize all the tenants of salvation, but in the end said, “what does all of that matter if there aren’t any boys who like me?” She knew about Christ, but it was just an opinion that hadn’t reached her heart.

Keller outlines the tension between mind and emotion: in the past, our hearts were perceived as the exertion of will and thought over feeling or desire; now, the heart evokes emotion over the mind.

The biblical concept of the heart, of course, goes far above all of that. The heart is the seat of what you trust the most, what you are committed to the most—trust in the Lord with all your heart; where your treasure is, there your heart is also—the heart is what you most hope in, what most captures your imagination. It is what you face, the center of your attention, your main commitment. Whatever those things are affects your mind, your will, and your emotions. Your thinking and your feeling.

What does it take for something to grab my heart? What has reached my heart? I’ve always been a cerebral person; God strikes me in etymological study more than in song. I am as awed by an intellectual discovery in a bible passage as I am by a mountain range. So I seek him with my mind, and the danger has always been acquiring truths that I know, but not that I know. Someone once said, “interpretation without application is abortion.”

This all made me think too of what it means to reach our children’s hearts. There’s a lot of talk about this—about how you can enforce rules, but if you don’t reach your child’s heart, it doesn’t mean anything—and there are lots of books out there about this (most of which I haven’t read).

I do pray regularly for the hearts of our kids. I pray for safety and health and a straight path, but what I really want is for their hearts to be after God, more than anything else. How that lives out may look different for each of them, and the nuances of how I reach them for that may differ, but in the end I keep coming back to this: the children see my heart. They see my heart every day, and that more than anything else at this stage will affect what they desire. Maybe when they get older we’ll have more complex discussions regarding cultural narratives and personality types and specific influences, but right now, they are turned inwards, watching me every day. What captures my imagination captures their imagination; what I commit to they commit to; what I treasure, they treasure.

So it all cycles back to: what has reached my heart? If an alien came to observe and record my daily actions, words, and thoughts, what would they conclude about what seats my mind, emotions, and will? What would they infer about my hopes and desires? When I discover a truth about God, am I meditating that truth into reality, internalizing it into the muscles of everyday life? Engaging it in my imagination? Am I being affected today by the hope I have in the future?

These years of young childhood are precious. The kids want to be close, so close, all the time. They want to ingest everything I do and say and think. They set their whole worlds in my orbit; they revolve around my center, so I have to be extra-vigilant about that center. They may hear my words or obey my commands, but what they really internalize is my heart, and that is something I live out.