I. Our Identity Resides In Our Heart
II. God knows us by our heart
III. Holy Spirit will write God’s instructions on our heart
Open with prayer. God help us to understand our hearts, and help us give our hearts to you.
Talk about my recent journey with heart health.
The word heart appears 726 times in 677 verses in the NASB translation of the Bible. I found 56 verses that I could have used for this sermon alone. There are 21 Hebrew words and 9 Greek words that can be translated as heart. All that to say that it would take quite a long time to cover every possible aspect of what the Bible says about the heart. This sermon is only an introduction to this topic. What I hope to accomplish today is just to encourage you to dive deeper into this topic with the help of the Holy Spirit.
The main Hebrew word for heart is lēḇ. The main Greek word for heart is kardia. The word for heart as it’s used in the Bible has a complex meaning that is hard to fully capture in English. And those various meanings are:
inner man, soul, will, conscience, mind, understanding, knowledge, thinking, reflection, memory, inclination, resolution, determination, moral character, seat of appetites, seat of emotions and passions, seat of courage
When the Bible mentions the heart it is very rarely referring to the physical organ that resides in our chest.
Proverbs 21:2 ESV Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.
Proverbs 27:19 ESV As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.
The heart is the seat of our identity.
I took a class on Old Testament culture and customs, and part of the class talked about what the Bible is referring to when it talks about the heart, as the ancient Hebrews understood it. The ancient Hebrews didn’t consider thoughts to be originated in the brain - they didn’t even have a specific word for brain. For them the mind resided in the heart. In fact, there is no biblical Hebrew or Greek word for brain. There are Hebrew and Greek words for brain today, but those words are not used to mean brain in the bible.
That is an important fact because our modern way of thinking is pretty much centered on the brain as the central hub of all our activity. In order for you to properly understand the rest of what I’m going to say - you have to think biblically - that is, you have to forget about the brain and focus on the heart as the central hub of your being.
That might be a hard concept for modern thinkers to grasp, so to help you - think of a sci-fi movie where a mad scientist is trying to move a person into a different body. Today the movie would depict a person’s brain being transplanted into another body and the entire person would be transferred to the new body with the brain. If the ancient Hebrews wrote that script they would have transplanted the heart instead of the brain and the rest of the story would be the same.
And they aren’t wrong. There are actually recorded cases today of people who have had heart transplants actually developing the personality traits of the heart donor.
I was talking to a friend a few weeks back and she mentioned that her dad had a heart transplant. Without saying anything about this, I asked if his personality changed after the transplant. She looked at me with a bit of surprise and said, “Actually, yes, it did.” And then she went on to tell me about how her father never liked chocolate, or sports, and was a nice, but somewhat serious guy. And after the transplant he now loves chocolate, is a big sports fan, and has become funny. She went on to tell me that through correspondence with the donor’s family her family came to find out that the donor loved chocolate, was a huge hockey fan, and was pretty funny.
This isn’t a one-off phenomenon either. According to some statistics I looked up this happens in about 90% of all heart transplants.
In some instances the heart donor was murdered and the recipient was able to provide details to help the police catch the murderer.
Our true identity resides in our heart. And that is why God is so focused on the state of our heart.
Now, I could go any number of directions with this topic, but I prayed about it and the Lord led me to focus on the great commandment.
Let’s start with Matthew 22:36-40. The great commandment gets it’s name from a passage in Matthew where a Pharisee asks Jesus,
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ “This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”
Mark and Luke both have this same conversation, but they quote the Old Testament a little differently for the first part. They say, “AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.” So they add in the word strenght, but otherwise say the same as Matthew.
And they are all quoting from two places in the old testament.
Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
And Leviticus 19:18 is where we get “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
When we hear these various renditions of Deuteronomy 6:5 our modern minds tend to try to compartmentalize the different aspects of ourself that are mentioned - heart, mind, soul, strength, might. But that’s not how the original author intended it to be understood. Those words are not separate categories. To them our heart, soul, and mind all reside in the same place. And our strength and might are related to the intensity of our love for God, not how much we can bench press. In the Hebrew context which these words were first written - they are all pointing to the same thing - yourself.
To love God with all of your heart is to love Him with your very essence. To love God with all of your soul is to root your entire life perspective in Him. The Greek word for soul is psyche. To love God with all your mind is not just to study harder, but to base all of your beliefs and values in Him. To love God with all your strength, all your might, means to love God with all your passion and courage, and purpose.
And just stop to think for a moment. Doesn’t God love us with all He is? Didn’t Jesus come to show us that God loves us with all His heart? Didn’t Jesus give all of Himself for us on the cross. He held nothing back - even giving up His very life for us. And He did it to impart His identity - His heart - to us.
The commandment to love God is not about Him making us bow down and worship Him - although we should. The commandment is a statement of our half of the relationship that God intends for us to have with Him. God loves us with all His heart, and He wants us to love Him with all our heart - that is, all of our being.
Now there are two commandments here that both fall under the title of The Great Commandment, but they are two only in order of priority - otherwise they are essentially the same. Our first love should be God, but we should have no less love for our neighbor. This command is telling us to love God with all that we are, and to love our neighbor as ourself - which is also all that we are - so they are not two different kinds of love. When you can love God with all that you are - with the totality of your being - only then can you love your neighbor as yourself.
You could restate the great commandment as “Love God with all of yourself, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus Himself says that the rest of the scriptures depend on the great commandment. In other words, everything God is trying to teach us through everything that’s written in the Bible boils down to Him teaching us to love with all we are.
How do we get to the place where we love God and our neighbor with all that we are?
The first step is by believing in Jesus. We cannot accomplish the great commandment in and of our own will. We need the heart of the Father and the help of the Holy Spirit and we can only receive those from the Son of God. It only comes through faith.
God knows the heart of men. From Adam until today God has seen the hardness and evil of the heart of man, but He has also seen the compassion and righteousness of man too. He knows that without Him we are lost in the darkness, but He knows that we will also follow His light if He shines it on us. And so God hasn’t given up on us, but has given us a way to follow Him, to love Him, and to be blessed by Him.
Ezekiel 36:26 (God is talking to Israel) And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Jeremiah 31:33 “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
God told Ezekiel that He would give His people a heart transplant - replacing a heart of stone with a heart of flesh. And He told Jeremiah that He would write His instructions on our hearts. So God said He will give us a new heart and then put new instructions in our heart.
Now think about this. How did God give His instructions, His law, to Moses? Wasn’t it on stone tablets? God gave Moses the stone tablets, and Israel followed God with a heart of stone.
Now He says that instead of carving His commandments on tablets of stone, He will write His instructions on our hearts. Those hearts are hearts of flesh. And where does that heart of flesh come from? It comes from the new covenant. Didn’t Jesus come in the flesh to show us God’s heart for us? Through faith in Jesus, we recieve new hearts, hearts of flesh, by the indewelling of the Holy Spirit.
That is what it means to be born again. It’s not that we get a new body, but that we get a new heart - new identity, new beliefs, new values, new passions, and a new purpose.
John 3:3-7 (Jesus is talking to Nicodemus) Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.” “What do you mean?” exclaimed Nicodemus. “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?” Jesus replied, “I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life. So don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it wants. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”
Just like you can’t tell what personality traits a heart recipient will inherit from the donor, you can’t tell how people are born of the Spirit. There’s no way to know if a heart recipient is going to inherit any traits from the donor, and there is certainly no way to know which ones they will inherit. All we can say for sure is that there is evidence, after the heart transplant happens, that the recipient did in fact recieve some traits from the donor.
That’s basically what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus. Being born again is going to change you, but there’s no way for anyone to know exactly how it’s going to change you. God does put His heart within us, and there is evidence of changes happening within us after it happens. But what are the personality traits that we inherit when we get a new heart from God?
I think you might have heard of them before. Galatians 5:22 The Fruits of the Spirit But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control
These are the personality traits that we all begin to exhibit when we receive a new heart from God. The fruit of the Spirit is produced in us, not by our own efforts and works, but by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in us. It’s by the Holy Spirit working through us that the fruit of the Spirit is borne out through us.
Think about that for moment. When we are born again, it is an act of the spirit. God gives us a new heart, and He writes His instructions on our heart, and the result is that we inherit the personality of God - which we call the fruits of the spirit.
And it’s not just the fruits of the spirit that we inherit from God, but it is the redeeming light of God.
2 Corinthians 4:6-7 NLT For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.
Our hearts without God are like the earth when it was created - formless and void and covered in darkness. When God enters our heart He shines His redeeming light into it and redeems us - our heart, soul, mind, and strength - back to Him. God fills our hearts with His presence - like filling clay jars with pure gold - and we become something precious and invaluable because we carry His presence in us. We become sacred living temples of the Holy Spirit.
This is not something we can do ourselves. Faith is a gift from God. When you are reborn God makes you a new person in your heart. It’s like having a heart transplant, and you receive the heart of Jesus, and you start to exhibit Jesus’s personality traits and character. When God gives you the gift of faith it’s like He’s saying “let there be light” - in you. And His light in you begins the work of a new creation for His glory.
I’ve mentioned writing several times so far, so I want to focus on that a little bit. God speaks, but He also does a lot of writing.
How do we know about everything God has done, and will do? It’s because God wrote it down. The Bible is written by the Holy Spirit working through people throughout time. Even now God is writing His story on your heart, and passing you along to others like a letter. He passed down His story through the writings in the Bible, and He is passing along His story through everything He is writing on your heart.
God told Jeremiah that He would write His instructions on our hearts. But this isn’t like the instructions He wrote to Moses on stone tablets. God is writing His instructions for you on your heart right now. His instructions for you are your identity in Him. It’s not about suggestions or guidelines, it’s the core of who you are as a child of God. He is writing His purpose for you into you, and equipping you with everything you need to carry that purpose out.
2 Corinthians 3:2-3 NLT The only letter of recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your lives are a letter written in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. Clearly, you are a letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This “letter” is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.
What is God writing on your heart? Who is He shaping you into? What identity is He creating in you? What work is He doing in you that you need to share with others? You are a love letter from God to somebody. Do you allow others to read God’s love in you? Your ministry is not a work of your own making. It’s not about your brains, or charisma, or passion. It’s about what God is writing on your heart, and where God is sending you to be read.
Your heart is the seat of your identity. God is writing a new identity into you; into your heart. Holy Spirit is bearing fruit through you by writing God’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control into who you are. And God is equipping you with everything you need by filling you with the treasure of His creative, redeeming light.
Will you surrender to what God is writing into you, or are you going to try to edit what He’s writing? Are you willing to be an open book, and an open heart, to those around you who need to see God in action? Has your heart been changed from one of stone to a heart of flesh?
If you haven’t experienced this and you want God to give you a new heart and write a new creation into you, I will be happy to pray with you about that. God is willing to give it to you. It doesn’t matter who you were because God’s going to change you into a new, reborn, person anyways.
God has written books and letters to you, and He is writing even more within you and within those around you. I encourage you to meditate on that, and also incorporate writing into your identity as a follower of God - you are made in His image, afterall. Writing will help you clarify your thoughts, your purpose, and your identity in Christ. It will also help you focus on God more clearly and intentionally, and reach new depths in your relationship with Him.
I find that I most often hear from God through the act of writing. When I write, things come out through me that I didn’t know, or wasn’t even thinking of. The words just flow, and I read them and am moved by them in a way that only God could move me. So, please, if you don’t know any other way to hear from God, or to understand what He’s doing in you, try writing to Him. Write from your heart.
There is a lot more we could cover with this topic, but I think we have plumbed the depths pretty well for today. Like I said, this is meant to be an introduction to the depth of what the heart means in the Bible. Just remember that, biblically speaking, your heart is the seat of your identity.
Before we end I want to encourage you to write. Everyone take a note card and write down something between you and God. It can be a bible verse, a prayer, a question, anything that you want to carry around with you for a while and meditate on in your relationship with Him. God loves to write, and I can think of no better way to stay in communication with Him than to write back.
So, take a few minutes and write down something between you and God that you would like to carry around and come back to.
What is your identity in God? What is God writing on your heart?