As I was driving to a meeting this morning, I was thinking about love, and how central the human heart is to life. I began to think about my own life, whether my heart was alive and awake, or if I had slipped into auto pilot. There are many people who have never had their hearts awakened, who have been living on auto pilot their entire lives, but then there are those of us who have come alive at some point in time, and who are continually being awakened, but who are still able to slip into auto pilot and often do.

I find it interesting that when Jesus walked this earth, He did not go around giving lists of rules. Instead, he talked a lot about the condition of people’s hearts. We usually don’t like this; we would prefer the rules to be clear-cut and black-and-white. (This is usually so that we can point out when someone is breaking a rule.) But if Jesus’ standard is the condition of the heart, that means only He and that person can render a true verdict. And honestly, we ourselves don’t even comprehend the motives of our own hearts all of the time. I love how 1 John 3:20, which talks about confidence in approaching God, tells us that even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, because the righteousness that He gives us is far more powerful than even our biggest and deepest sins. The verse ends by stating that God knows everything. So when we feel condemned, He is bigger than that, despite the fact that He knows everything about us—even the things we don’t know about ourselves.

Jesus cares deeply about our hearts, because He cares deeply about us, and He knows that the heart is central to life. What a shame that many Christians have been taught that their hearts are bad, and therefore the desires of their hearts should be suppressed.

What if we lived life in a way where we listened to the desires of our hearts and had the courage to follow them? What if we kept doing this, even when it gets us in trouble?

What I am trying to say is, not everything we desire is necessarily good for us, but those desires can still give us clues that are vital to knowing ourselves. Sometimes we have to fail a time or two dozen on the road to discovering who God created and redeemed us to be. It’s okay. He calculated that in ahead of time. You don’t have to worry about missing out on what He has for you, just enjoy the journey.