Follow your heart.
Despite good intentions and an understandable point, this advice should be listed as one of the most destructive. We understand the gist: do what we love, find what makes us happy, listen to our instincts. I can value the principle of checking in with ourselves; our passions, our talents, going against the grain when necessary. These can easily be used to the glory of God and shouldn’t be brushed off.
But that’s the catch: unless our hearts are daily shaped by God and the word, unless our conscience has been molded according to heavenly wisdom, unless our delight is in the Lord, our natural heart will lead us to places we didn’t intend to go.
Today’s reading included 1 Kings 11, where we see the downfall of the great and wise Solomon. Apparently all the wisdom in the world couldn’t keep Solomon’s heart from leading him to destruction.
If Solomon was blessed with wisdom by God yet could stray so far from him, what is wisdom if it can’t keep you near God?
The bible speaks of two kinds of wisdom: worldly and heavenly. They’re both accessible; we absorb worldly wisdom both subconsciously and through experience and counsel, and we attain heavenly wisdom by asking God, studying and experience and counsel.
Worldly wisdom is our default. We learn the ways of the world and the teachings of our culture and current cultural worldview by living life, ingesting media, speaking with others, even if we’re not actively pursuing any of it. And though we can seek and find God’s wisdom, it’s not a one-and-done deal; in order to grow in his wisdom, it has to be a daily pursuit, and in order for us to successfully pursue something daily, our heart has to be set on it, right?
The heart, the seat of our motivations, the determining factor of which path we will take, is crucial to which kind of wisdom will become our expertise.
That’s why certain guardrails were set in place that should have kept Solomon on the right track. Instead, his affections got wrapped up in women who did not follow Yahweh. For all his wisdom that resulted in much wealth and many women, Solomon was at his heart, foolish. In the end, and what so many remember of him today, his wisdom amounted to nothing other than plain worldly success.
To someone who has not glimpsed the unmeasurable riches of God, maybe following your heart to earthly success and happiness doesn’t seem like such a bad deal at all. But it reminds me of a quote by C.S. Lewis:
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
The tragedy in this story of course, is that Solomon was no stranger to the power and goodness of God. If he was not immune to the allure of temptation, neither are we. Every path in life comes with its own dangers, and we see the same theme of Solomon’s life played out even today in the lives of the wealthy. They are intelligent, wise, successful, powerful, they may even do great things. They may follow God for a time. But sadly, that power can corrupt, authority over others can cause forgetfulness of God’s authority over us, materialism can be justified and bought into (no pun intended), and ultimately, our heart will very slowly and very subtly begin cling to many forms of creation rather than clinging wholly to the Creator.
Indeed, it seems it would be good to examine our hearts more often than we follow them.
Pursue Righteousness 