Where Is Your Heart Set?

by David Gibson

In the Bible, “heart” almost always refers to the inner person where we make choices, good or bad (Matthew 15:15:19; I Peter 3:4). D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones defines the heart as “the centre of man’s being and personality; it is the fount out of what everything else comes” [Studies in the Sermon on the Mount].

Bible Examples

• King Rehoboam “did evil, for he did not set his heart to seek the LORD” (II Chronicles 12:14).
• “'O Daniel, man greatly loved,' the angel said, '. . . for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words'” (Daniel 10:11-12).
• “For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the Lord, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel” (Ezra 7:10).

Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

A Christian teen once told me he was determined to keep himself pure for marriage. He and his wife have been married for 30 years, and their relationship is one of the best! He had set his heart!

“As unadulterated water is said to be pure, and gold without alloy is pure gold, so the pure heart is the undivided heart where there is no conflict of loyalties, no cleavage of interests, no mixture of motives, no hypocrisy and no insecurity. It is wholeheartedness God-wards” [R. A. Finlayson in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 1306-1307].

The condition of our heart is God’s first concern (I Samuel 16:7; I Chronicles 28:9; Jeremiah 17:9-10; Revelation 2:23).

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalms 19:14).