01 November 2007 Devotion for Today “The Heart” Ephesians 1:17-18
Bruce Larson tells the story of a lady who came to see him about joining the church. She said her doctor had sent her. Recently, the lady had a facelift and when her doctor dismissed her he gave her this advice: “My dear, I have done an extraordinary job on your face, as you can see in the mirror. I have charged you a great deal of money and you were happy to pay it. But I want to give you some free advice. Find a group of people who love God and who will love you enough to help you deal with all the negative emotions inside of you. If you don’t, you’ll be back in my office in a very short time with your face in far worse shape than before.”
How true that is. Perhaps that is why someone once said: “Beauty is only skin-deep; but ugly goes clear to the bone!” All humor aside, negative emotions can distort our faces and create a lot of ugliness in the world. But there is a cure for it.
Paul writes in Ephesians 1:17-18 “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of all glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened: that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”
In the original language, the word understanding is translated from the word cardia. One does not need to know Greek to know that cardia means heart. If I am sitting here writing and suffer a cardiac arrest, you will know that my heart has stopped beating. Dr. John MacArthur writes that “in most modern cultures, the heart is thought of as the seat of emotions and feelings. But most ancients- Hebrews, Greeks, and many others-considered the heart to be the center of knowledge, understanding, thinking, and wisdom. The heart was considered to be the seat of the mind and will, and it could be taught what the brain could never know.” (John MacArthur, Commentary on Ephesians, p. 45).
Metaphorically, we normally associate the heart as the center of our feelings, but ancient people also believed feelings came from the abdomen, the intestines, or the stomach. Even today, we speak of having a “gut” feeling about something that we may not have logical evidence for, but we know it intuitively, or subjectively, nonetheless.
This is why Paul calls upon the eyes of one’s heart to be enlightened. We don’t have to be physicians to know that the human heart does not have an eyeball sticking out of it, so we know that Paul is speaking metaphorically here. The human heart is not the organ of the body which receives enlightenment, either. But this is all beside the point. Where ever we receive the enlightenment, we know that it is God who gives it when our hearts (or minds) are yielded to it. Enlightenment sets off a spark of understanding which opens up a whole new world for us that we never believed was true before, or never knew existed before. There is excitement and interest, and enthusiasm about what God is doing in your life. There is a richness where emptiness had been before. We should not play down our emotions. Emotions play a significant part in the Christian’s life, but they are reliable only as they are guided by God’s truth, which we can understand through our minds.
What is your heart telling you today? Has it been a while since you have had that sense of enlightenment which can spark a passion? Jesus Christ not only sparks it once, but again and again. May you have His enlightenment within you as you go about a busy and productive day, knowing that what you do makes a greater difference now that Jesus Christ is part of it.
Have a blessed day.
Rev. Jeffery C. Russell
Elizabeth City, NC
jefferyrussell@embarqmail.com
jcrussell@liberty.edu
Church website: http://25621.lifewaylink.com
Devotion Archives: http://www.msnusers.com/DevotionforToday
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