Message: “So What’s in Your Heart?” from Steven A. Bush

Mark 12:30-31 is Jesus' response when asked about the greatest commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” (ESV) A working definition of what the Bible calls the heart, might be this: "Our inner most selves, the core of our beings, made up of our minds, wills, and emotions." But then Jeremiah 17:9 says: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (ESV) Ecclesiastes 9:3b sounds similar: "The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead." (NIV) This might give us pause when we consider the popular phrase, "Just follow your heart." But when Christ comes as our Redeemer, He powerfully and masterfully changes our hearts, both initially and progressively. The Holy Spirit transforms our hearts and increasingly makes our hearts like His. And this means, hopefully, that our love for God as well as others does not come from some sense of ought or duty in attempts to gain right standing, but rather from love--that is love from the heart. May He who has begun this good work in us bring it to full fruition!