Two Ways to Move My Faith from Head to Heart

Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash

We often hear that our faith does us no good if it’s all in our head and not in our hearts, and we don’t disagree. No one likes to live with the cognitive dissonance of the mind and the heart being out of alignment.

But what does it mean for our faith to be in our hearts, and how do we get it from head to heart?

The “heart” is a biblical term for the center of our being, the place where our real identity and decision-making reside. When our mind and our passions align with our will, have internalized our values; we are “acting from the heart.”

But we know that it’s easy to go through the motions, to disengage internally so that our hearts are disconnected from our minds. We know truth that we don’t own, truth that hasn’t yet soaked in.

There are several ways that our faith can make its way into our hearts. Here are two:

1. Our faith moves from our head to our heart by rehearsal.

This is what our spiritual forebears understood in the days before writing and books hijacked learning. I know, that sounds harsh, especially coming from a booklover like me. But as inefficient as it might seem from our perspective (especially in the digital age), the ancients’ oral culture had some huge advantages. They learned not by reading but by memorizing and reciting. Hebrew schoolboys were expected to commit the entire Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) to memory. Hebrew scholars could cite specific phrases from the Scriptures by memory, without the aid of books or devices.

Our ancient forebears knew God’s promise to Joshua: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it” Josh 1:8). They knew the great Psalm 119, that monumental celebration (176 verses!) of the beauty and value of Scripture; the word “heart” appears fifteen times in that psalm. Centuries before print and digital resources made it possible to personally possess the Scripture, the psalmist understood how to hide God’s Word in his heart, to cherish it and feed on it in his mind. This constant hearing and reciting of Scripture meant that God’s Word could find its way from their heads to their hearts.

It was by no means certain that the men who memorized Scripture had a heart for God: Jesus’ most implacable enemies were the scribes and Pharisees, men who knew the Scripture inside out. But the negative example of the scribes and Pharisees doesn’t give us an excuse jump to the convenient conclusion that committing God’s Word is fruitless. Especially in our distracted age, filling our minds with God’s Word is one of the best ways to move His truth from our heads to our hearts.

2. But there is another means God sometimes uses to move His truth from our heads to our hearts.

I was talking with a young man about this question of how God moves His truth into our hearts. I asked him what his experience had been, and his answer surprised me. He told me that God had used suffering to imbed His truth in his heart.

That was a wise answer. God sometimes must use suffering to disturb our complacency. Suffering has a way of prompting us to reevaluate our assumptions about ourselves, about our priorities, about the work of God in our lives. Suffering often has a clarifying effect on us.

Anyone who has walked with God for a long time can point to a time when God used suffering to do something in his life that could be done no other way, and when we see in retrospect how deeply we benefited from our troubles, we can even be thankful for our sorrows.

This means that when we are in the testing fire, one way we can pray is to ask God to make clear to us what He wants to teach us through it, knowing (as the old saying goes) that when God has His people in the furnace, He keeps His eye on the clock and His hand on the thermostat: He never leaves us in the fire longer than need be, and He uses only as much difficulty as is necessary to accomplish His wise and good purposes for our lives.

You can see that there is no simple or easy path from head to heart.

Rehearsal requires discipline and perseverance through tedium; suffering calls for courage and a deepening trust in God in the midst of suffering. Of the two, of course, we would choose rehearsal over suffering, and it may well be that the more we employ the former, the less we’ll need the latter.

The good news is that God will not be satisfied to leave us where we are. His Spirit is constantly about the task of our sanctification. This is His project, and He has promised that He will carry it through to completion: “I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6).

Until that Day comes, let’s persevere in making real what we already know.