Wear Your Heart on Your Lips

My houseboats devo for our high school students:

When Jesus was asked, “which, of these hundreds of rules that I’ve been taught to follow, is the greatest, most important rule?” he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 22:36-40). In other words, “when you can love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself, everything else will work itself out, and God will be honored! So, stick to these and all those other rules will naturally be taken care of.”

There are two things we should note here:
1. Praise God that he included, “all” in his commandment! “All your heart… all your soul… all your mind.” That definitely leaves me no room to play with the temptation to think I can get away with giving him a little bit. Praise God that he lays it out for us and makes it clear!
2. Jesus first said, “with all your heart.” He didn’t leave out the heart. He didn’t simply say, “love the Lord your God with all of your soul” (who you are, what you’re doing) and “love the Lord your God with all of your mind” (all of your thoughts and intellect). Instead, he first mentions the place that, for Jesus, represented devotion, admiration, emotion; all that stuff that moves you, drives you, gives you passion to act. After all, loving God with your soul and with your mind, that comes from what your heart admires and what your heart is devoted to.

It seems to me, then, that our hearts are meant to be filled with love for God. If we are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our heart, that implies that all of our heart should be filled with love for God (or we should be working toward that, anyway).

If we have love for God, we must also be passionate about and love those things that he delights in: love, justice, righteousness, humility… you, those around you, those who are less fortunate than you. (Jeremiah 9:24, Psalm 149:4)

Interestingly, Jesus also said, “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart…” (Matthew 15:18a)

It’s kind of like Jesus said, “You wear your heart on your lips. People will know what your heart loves by the way you talk.”

And he continues by saying, “and this defiles a person.”

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I made some really close friends, Steve and Amy. We all lifeguarded at the pool on campus. In our free time we off-roaded in the jeep that Steve was rebuilding (yeah, rebuilding – I don’t know how many times we got “stuck” on top of Mt. Baldy and had to wait for Steve to get the jeep back to working condition). We had a blast hanging out together and grew pretty close throughout the summer.

When school started again so did my second job. I became pretty busy doing school-work and working two jobs. Steve, Amy, and I were pretty used to hanging out everyday, but when school started I just couldn’t manage hanging out everyday on top of taking care of my responsibilities.

One evening, Steve called and said, “Hey, Amy and I were thinking of taking the jeep out again tonight, come with us!” I told him I had tons of homework and I was on duty at work till 11pm. He was upset that the last time he had asked to hang out I also had work, so he told me, “well call me when you’re free ‘cuz we never get to hangout anymore.” I felt like that was pretty lame – we had totally been hanging out together, just not every single day, like we had in the summer.

About 15 minutes later, I was sitting at work and I received a text message from Steve. It read, “Forget Stephanie, she’s being a [brat]. She’s not coming with us.”

Immediately, my heart sank and I thought, this was totally meant for Amy, not me. And that means that they’re talking about me behind me back. And that’s totally not fair! I have other things to do! I was devastated and texted him back, “I think you meant to send this to Amy, but I want to let you know that I got it and that really hurt my feelings.”

Since then, our friendship has never been the same again. I saw that he had bitterness and resentment stored up in his heart. I got a glimpse of what was in his heart through the words he chose to use, and it was ugly.

Granted, that wasn’t his whole heart. I had seen parts of his heart before that I loved and I loved to be around – we were close friends! But that little peek into that part of his heart caused me to wonder if I could trust him and if he really valued me and if our relationship was a safe place for me to be who God made me.

James, a follower of Jesus, a servant of God who holds great spiritual authority, the writer of the biblical book of James, said, it is a deception for any of us to think that Jesus can be Lord over our life, without also becoming Lord over our tongue. He wrote “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (James 1:26). Wow! Our tongues can render our religiousness, our being doers of God’s commandments (James 1:22-25), worthless. Words can completely work against all of our actions. We’ve heard before that actions speak louder than words… D.H. Lawrence, a well-known, early 20th Century author wrote, “Oh, words are action good enough, if they’re the right words.” And maybe they’re action bad enough, hurtful enough, if they’re the wrong ones.

I’m thinking that how we talk to one another, the things we say, even when joking, exposes the depths of our hearts – our bitterness, our anger, our resentment, our disregard for a creator who loves his creation. I think that the things we say are as impactful as our actions toward one another. I think that our religious actions can be negated by our consitent sarcasm.