Theme of the Week: The Heart
Bible Verse: And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immoralities, thefts, murders, adulteries, greed, evil actions, deceit, self-indulgence, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these things come from within and defile a person.” Mark 7:21-23
Scripture Reading: Mark 7:14-23
National Geographic describes the heart as: “the body’s engine room, responsible for pumping life-sustaining blood via a 60,000-mile-long (97,000-kilometer-long) network of vessels. The organ works ceaselessly, beating 100,000 times a day, 40 million times a year—in total, clocking up three billion heartbeats over an average lifetime. It keeps the body freshly supplied with oxygen and nutrients while clearing away harmful waste matter.”
This organ, the size of your fist, is central to your very life as a human. It is no wonder the Bible talks about the heart almost 1,000 times. In Mark 7, Jesus finds himself in an environment where people were looking at human behaviour and saying humans were defiled (or sinful) because of what they did or did not do. Jesus indicates the problem is deeper than our actions. He said the problem is in our hearts.
But what does that mean? What is the heart in the Bible?
To many of us, we think of the heart as being about our emotions. In the Scripture, it is so much more than that.
Theologian Walter Elwell writes, “The heart is also used very frequently in a psychological sense, as the center or focus of man’s inner personal life. The heart is the source, or spring, of motives; the seat of the passions; the center of the thought processes; the spring of conscience.”
In short, the heart is the “why you do what you do” – the “why you feel what you feel” – the “why you think what you think.”
Your physical heart is amazing, but even more amazing is the spiritual heart and how it shapes every part of your being.
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