TUESDAY 20th
Deuteronomy 6:1-9
NIV (v6) – ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.’
ESV (v6) – ‘And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.’
The human body is amazing, David the psalmist said in Psalm 139 ‘I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.’ (vv14-15) When you start to consider the various parts that make up our body, the intricate details of the blood vessels, the nerve system, the skeleton and then the important functions of the various organs, we surely have to join with the Psalmist and exclaim ‘I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.’
In our verse today, the text homes in onto the human heart. What an incredible organ, scientists tell us that the average human heart beats around 100,000 times a day as it pumps the oxygenated blood (aprox’ 5.7 litres) around the body keeping us alive, and pumps deoxygenated blood through the lungs, back to the heart to be circulated again. The heart is essential to life, but at the same time so are the other organs as well, but we all realise the need to do all we can to maintain a healthy heart to be able to live a healthy life. It is no coincidence that the heart is seen as the integral organ in Scripture regarding the life of an individual, not just physically, but spiritually as well. And so often it is the heart that is referred to when it comes to spiritual matters. In our text, the commandments or the law of God is to be on our hearts, that is just as oxygenated blood gives life to the physical, the law of God brings life to the spiritual, it is the place which we consider to be the seat of our emotions, we would say to somebody, ‘I love you with all of my heart’, in saying this we are declaring that we love them with all that we are, a complete love without any reservations.
You will remember that we saw a few devotions ago that we are to love the Lord with all our heart, which means completely, wholeheartedly, as if our life depends upon it and it does, for our eternal life does depend upon our response to loving the LORD God with all our hearts, that is with all our inner being, our souls.
When we come to faith, a phrase which is often used is ‘that we have given our hearts to Jesus’. What we are saying is that we have yielded our lives to him, that is ‘all that we are and have now belong to him’, our lives are centred around him, he has become our hearts desire, he is the one who we live for.
I know what I want to share today, but am struggling to find the right language or words, but I can best sum it up this way, just as we need to have a regular health check, in particular to ensure all is well with the heart physically, so we need to have regular spiritual heart checks, to ensure that all is well with our hearts spiritually.
We need to ensure that our hearts are beating with the heart of God, that they are in tune with his heartbeat of love. That we are keeping in rhythm with that which is his perfect will for our lives, that we ensure that our hearts are spiritually fit to keep in step with the Spirit, not lagging behind because of some spiritual disease that may be dragging us down.
Tomorrow, I will use the devotion to remind us of some of the Scriptures that refer to the heart.