A Silent Heart Problem

Will your heart keep you from finishing well?

My yearly Bible reading plan has me reading through 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles these days. I’ve tried hard to keep up with the various kings in both Israel and Judah. Things were a lot easier to follow when the Kingdom was a united Israel led by Saul, David, and Solomon.

Almost all of the kings in the Northern Kingdom of Israel were quite the losers. The kings in the Southern Kingdom of Judah proved to be roller coaster. There were some pretty good ones - Asa, Jehoshaphat, and Joash to name a few. But more often than not, even the ones that started well didn’t finish well.

But one particular description of one of the fairly good kings hit me like a ton of bricks. The description of Amaziah - Joash’s son - in 2 Chronicles 25:2 were a clue that things would not end well.

And he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, yet not with a whole heart.

“…yet not with a whole heart.”

Like many of us, Amaziah struggled with the competing desires of wanting to the right things and the popular things. Those two desires are usually at odds with one another. The rest of Chapter 25 reads like a rollercoaster ride of his ups and downs; his good deeds and his mistakes. While the specific actions may be different, the ups and downs seem eerily familiar.

Fractions and Our Heart

You have heard the expression that someone is making an effort that is “half-hearted.” We understand that means they are doing something that they KNOW they should do, but don’t FEEL like doing it. Most of us learned about fractions in elementary school. The best example for understanding fractions is slicing a pizza or a pie. You can cut it into as many pieces as you want. And the pieces don’t even have to be the same size and/or shape. But the more pieces you have, the smaller the pieces will be.

How does that happen to our hearts? One way is we try to segment our lives, and separate our walk with Jesus from other things in our life. I’ve been guilty of referring to my “spiritual life” or my “prayer life.” While not intending it to be that way, that languages suggests that the spiritual and prayer are lives of their own and may not be integrated into other segments of my life. We sometimes slice the pizza of our lives in to separate and distinct pieces, not letting the spiritual overlap with the other slices.

Another way we divide our heart is to dilute our hearts with many pursuits. We may not separate the spiritual from the rest of our lives, but we equate the other things in our lives as part of the spiritual. One example is to equate our politics with our spiritual walk. Those who do believe they are good Christians because they hold the right political opinions. Let me just confess that I cringe when I see the cross of Jesus draped with a flag. Or when I see other religious symbols - like the sign of the fish - mingled with a logo from a sports team.

The segmenting amounts to a “Jesus minus” mentality and the diluting to a “Jesus plus” mentality.

We can also divide our heart by crowding it out with other things. We can get so busy doing good things that we leave little room in our heart for God. We can even come to love those good things more than we love Him, although we tend to deny that. We value our sleep more than a quiet time of prayer with God. We choose to doom scroll social media rather than read God’s Word. Staying home to rest or taking a fun day trip seems more enjoyable than going to church.

All of these are symptoms of a divided heart.

Piecing It Back Together

When asked which of the commandments was the greatest, Jesus quotes the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4-5:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Do you notice all the inclusive words in that command? There is the inclusive description of all the facets of our lives - heart, soul, might. And there is the inclusive adverb “all.” God was saying we should love Him with every bit of every part of our lives. Everything else we do can flow from that.

So how can we diagnose and treat a fractioned heart?

First, ask God to help you see yourself honestly and completely. Ask Him to reveal things in your heart that have segmented Him, diluted Him, or even distracted you from Him. As He reveals things, confess your sin before Him, receive His gracious forgiveness. Repent and turn back to Him.

Once we get honest with ourselves, we are in a position to let God perform some blessed heart surgery on us. I dare you to pray the most courageous prayer in the Bible, Psalm 139:23-24:

Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!

And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

Curing us from a divided heart is a work of grace. We cannot do it ourselves, we need God’s power. The second step would be to take what He shows us as a result of that prayer and pray for His help. I suggest praying along with David as he prayed in Psalm 86:11:

Teach me Your way, O Lord,
that I may walk in Your truth;
unite my heart to fear Your name.

Then, expose yourself to God’s word intentionally, purposefully, and regularly. God’s Word is His revelation to us of Himself, His nature, and His ways. The more we gaze at Him in the pages of divine Scripture, the more the Holy Spirit transforms our heart. Specifically, read and meditate on what God has done for us in Christ. Consider His love for us and His commitment to us. How could we not fall deeply, madly in love with such a God as He?

Psalm 119:97 - Oh how I love your law!
It is my meditation all the day.

My prayer for you is as it is for me. May God help me to finish well. May He pull my fractioned heart into one piece that loves Him supremely.