Purpose & Calling
Everyone says to follow my heart, but my heart has been wrong before. Can I trust what I feel about this?
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
Jeremiah spoke to a nation confident it was fine while heading straight for exile. The famous line about the heart is not contempt for emotion. It is a diagnosis offered to people whose sincere convictions were walking them off a cliff, and it comes attached to a claim that God sees what we cannot see about ourselves. Sincerity, on its own, is not a reliable instrument.
“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ;”
Paul prays for the Philippians, and what he asks for is interesting: not more feeling, but love that grows in knowledge and discernment so they can tell the difference between good options. Affection and judgement are meant to develop together. He assumes emotion belongs in a mature Christian life, and also assumes it needs educating over time.
A path forward
Ask what your feeling is actually about. Strong emotion usually attaches to a real need, and naming the need often changes the decision on its own.
Check the desire against scripture and against the people who know you well. Both are slower than instinct and considerably more reliable.
Pray the last two verses of Psalm 139 as your own words for a week, asking God to show you anything in your motives that you cannot see yourself.
Closing verse
“Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
- Psalm 139:23-24
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