The Heart

Many sects are more concerned with emotion than with Bible teaching.  They sometimes try to justify their attitude like this: You Christadelphians attach too much importance to knowledge.  God wants your heart rather than your brain. The word ‘heart’ is found about ten times as often in the Bible as the word ‘mind’; ‘brain’ is not there at all.  God says that if you have a sincere ‘heart’ you can draw near to Him (James 4:8).  To be saved, you only have to say that you believe in your heart (Romans 10:10), so why bother with a lot of knowledge? This argument sounds rather powerful until you look into it,  then you soon realize that it is all based upon a common mistake.  In Bible times people used to speak of the heart differently from the way we do nowaday, both in English and some other languages.

We usually associate the brain (or mind, or head) with thoughts and knowledge, and the heart with emotions such as love, joy, envy and hatred.  So you might hear someone say, ‘This man has the truth in his head, but I doubt if he has it in his heart’.  In other words, he knows the truth but he doesn’t seem to love it. (This, of course, is a figure of speech; any doctor will tell you that the heart does not really have anything to do with the emotions,)  It is a pump created to force our blood to circulate around our bodies.  Even so, it is a useful way of conveying an idea, even though it has no scientific basis).

Bro. Angelo Chege (Navonovu, Kenya)