If you’ve been told to ✨follow your heart✨ you’re not alone…

We’ve heard it in the Disney movies we watched as kids (and maybe still watch 😉), our favorite rom-coms and maybe even on the lips of some of our most trusted friends: Follow your heart!

But should you really?

Should we chase our hearts desires in hopes that our dreams will come true?

After all, “no matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true…” — A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes, Cinderella 1950

I’ve heard many Christians, including myself, quickly respond to this question with a resounding “No.”

“The heart is deceitful above all things…” They say, quoting Jeremiah 17:10.

But recently, as I was reading through the book of Jeremiah, I noticed something I had never encountered before…

A common topic throughout the book of Jeremiah is the heart of God’s people. They have hard hearts that will not listen to God’s words and continually reject His commands. They choose to live in rebellion and chase after their heart’s desires.

Time and time again we see them failing to listen to the Word of the Lord spoken to them through the prophet Jeremiah. God even goes so far as to describe them as possessing hearts of stone (Jeremiah 31:33; 32:39-40).

Jeremiah 17:1 says,

The sin of Judah is inscribed
with an iron stylus.
With a diamond point
it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts…

Jeremiah 17:1 CSB

Chiseled into the stone of their hearts is an account of their rebellion against our holy and righteous God.

Just like a tombstone is engraved with the date of a person’s life and death, the sins of God’s people have been engraved upon their hearts, serving as an indication of their spiritual death and a reminder that they are deserving of God’s wrath.

But even while God’s hand of judgment rests upon God’s people, they will not be condemned forever.

One day, they will be given a heart to know God (Jeremiah 24:7). One day He will take their heart of stone and transform it into a heart of flesh, one that can know Him and obey Him…one that is capable of desiring what is good.

They will be given hearts that are capable of knowing the God that created them. Hearts that will listen to His Word and respond in obedience. Hearts that have been completely made new by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And that, my friend, is the reality we are living in today.

For God’s people in the time of Jeremiah, this heart of flesh was several hundred years into the future. They were still living under the covenant that God made with Moses on Mount Sinai when He gave his people the 10 commandments…Laws that they would never be able to keep (Exodus 20).

But if you are a follower of Jesus and have trusted in His grace offered to us through His death, burial, and resurrection, your stony heart has undergone a metamorphosis.

If you are a follower of Jesus and have trusted in His grace offered to us through His death, burial, and resurrection, your stony heart has undergone a metamorphosis.

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Just like a caterpillar spins a chrysalis and—in some sense—dies to its life as a caterpillar, we have died to our sin and are alive in Christ (Romans 6)!

Our hearts—that is our whole being—have been made new!

In Christ, our hearts no longer only desire what is evil: selfish ambition, lustful pleasures, and worldly success…

In Christ, our heart’s desires are daily being shaped so that they will align with the will of God. Through the power of the Holy Spirit at work within us, we now desire to bring glory to our God and lift high His Name above all others.

No longer are our sins written on our hearts, but instead, God’s Word is written there.

God has given us a heart of flesh.

A heart that can know Him…

A heart that can obey Him…

A heart that can love Him…

This new heart of ours though, is not perfect. And it never will be as long as sin is still rampant in our world. But one day, we will truly be holy as Jesus is holy and the desires of our hearts will be perfectly in line with the desires found within the very heart of God (1 Peter 1:15-16).

One day, we will truly be holy as Jesus is holy and the desires of our hearts will be perfectly in line with the desires found within the very heart of God.

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But until that day, we must dwell in the tension, daily discerning whether the desires of our hearts stem from the sinful selfishness that still rears its ugly head when we choose ourselves over our Maker, or if they flow from a heart that is fully satisfied in our Savior and surrendered to His plan.

Should you follow your heart?

That depends on who it truly belongs to.

Does your heart belong to Jesus?

In this moment of tension between good and evil, is your heart reflecting the desires of your old self or the desires of your Savior?

Only when we answer these questions honestly will we know the truth. Only then will we know if our hearts are worth following.

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