“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

The world says again and again to follow your heart. Every song is flooded with cliches about “falling in love” and listening to your heart.

And up until recently, it sounded right to me too. Follow your heart! Enjoy the good feelings! Go with the flow. Don’t listen to advice. You’re happy, right? My head made constant arguments all for “losing myself” in the moment, in the feelings, in the glamor of “falling in love”.

But the Bible says the exact opposite. Our emotions are liars. Our hearts are “deceitful” and “desperately wicked” and it’s time we start listening to God and using discernment instead of allowing our feelings and lusts of the heart to drive us.

God is the only real thing. Our feelings are so good at creating alternate realities for us to escape in. And our hearts are good at convincing us that they make sense. We lose God’s whisper of truth inside of all the beautiful possibilities we invent for ourselves. And since god gives us what we want, since that is what love does, since He refuses us nothing…those lies become our reality.

We deform ourselves within them, reversing the work that God is trying to do, that of conforming us to the image of His son- the image of pure love, true, selfless, jealous love…love that waits patiently for us even as we run in the opposite direction, towards our feelings.

Satan is not an idiot. He is clever and he knows the way we work. He knows that we are desperate for love. Lust is not just about sex. Lust is about distracting us from God. Lust is about deceit, lies, and using another person for our own desires.

We are meant to be fulfilled in God, and only once He is enough for us, will we be enough for someone else.

/ heisjealousforme