Teach Your Children Not to Follow Their Hearts
One of the greatest challenges in Christian parenting is thinking clearly ourselves and helping our children think clearly about the dominant pop cultural statement of faith: follow your heart.
This is the belief that our heart is a kind of internal guru that will wisely utter truth to us if we will only listen to it. It is the belief that our heart is a kind of shepherd that will lead us to our true, individual promised land of happiness if we just have the courage to follow it. It is the belief that if we are lost, we must look to our heart, because our heart will save us.
Follow your heart is one of the few near sacred creeds our inclusive, pluralistic society endorses as a universal truth. And it’s ubiquitous. This belief is explicitly or implicitly woven through most of our popular songs and movies and TV shows and podcasts and novels and memoirs and self-help books and children’s resources and marketing messages (in every medium) and sporting events and…it’s everywhere.
That’s why it’s a great challenge for us parents. Our kids constantly hear throughout their most formative years to believe they should follow their hearts. It’s the cultural air they breathe. And they will absorb it as an unquestioned assumption unless we help them understand what God says the heart is and does, and why “follow your heart” can be a very dangerous thing.
What Is Our “Heart”?
Before going further, we need to ask, what is this mysterious thing we call the “heart”? Have you ever tried to answer that question concisely, in one sentence? I encourage you to try before reading further.
Given how familiar we are with the term the “heart,” many find it surprisingly difficult to define, which points to a problem we want to help our children avoid that I’ll get to in a moment. But here’s my attempt: the heart is the biblical metaphor for the part of our inner being (what we call our soul) that is the source of our affections.
Affections, put very simply, are what we call our inclinations (strong or weak) toward or away from someone or something. We often refer to these as “loves” or “hates.” We might think of affections as the indicators in our heart that tell us how much or little we treasure persons or things. And this makes our heart our soul’s treasurer.
That’s how the Bible describes it. In fact, it was Jesus who said, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21). And it’s why, when asked what our foremost calling is, he said we must love God with all our hearts (Matt. 22:37)—God is the supreme treasure in existence, so he must be the object of our greatest affections.
Understanding our heart, not as our internal wise guru or good shepherd, but as our internal treasurer will help us teach our children what the heart is designed and not designed to do.
What “Follow Your Heart” Really Means
If our heart is our soul’s treasurer, then what our heart treasures, it desires. In other words, our heart is a “wanter.” This is our children need to have clear in their minds. Because if they know the heart is a wanter, when they hear the phrase “follow your heart,” they can translate it into what it really means: “pursue what you want”—a phrase that shines a different light on things.
Words are powerful. Words can clear away a confusing fog and reveal glorious truth, or they can create a confusing, deceptive fog and obscure the truth. “Follow your heart” and “pursue what you want” are good examples.
Think about the statement “follow your heart.” It has a noble, adventurous, courageous, almost heroic ring to it, doesn’t it? It conveys the weight of moral obligation, as if to deny it would be to betray ourselves. That’s why people consider it almost a sacred creed. If someone is on a quest to follow their heart, it almost feels like a violation to question whether they should.
Now think about the statement “pursue what you want.” It doesn’t have the same ring, does it? As soon as we hear it, we intuitively recognize the moral ambiguities in play. We feel ambivalence due to the selfishness we know infects our motives. We might disagree on what wants should be pursued, but all of us would agree that not all wants should be pursued. We all know our hearts have plenty of wants that aren’t good for our hearts.
We Don’t Really Follow Our Hearts
But more than that, “pursue what you want” clarifies who follows what. The key words in this phrase are “what” and “want.” Our “wants” always follow a “what.” This is key for our children (and us) to understand. If our heart is our “wanter,” then our heart follows (or pursues) “what” it wants. If our heart is our treasurer, it follows (or pursues) what it treasures. In other words, we don’t follow our treasurer; our treasurer tells us what treasure we should follow.
This is why the phrase “follow your heart” is misleading. It confuses categories. It’s like saying follow your follower, or treasure your treasurer, or want your wanter. In this sense, none of us actually follows his heart.
And the Bible never instructs us to do so. The Bible only instructs our heart to do what God designed it to do: to feel right affections. God tells our heart to treasure what is truly valuable (Matt. 13:44), to love what is right for the right reasons (Matt. 22:37–39), to trust what is true (Prov. 3:5–6), and to hate what is evil (Ps. 97:10).
Teach Them to Direct Their Hearts, Not Follow Them
To be fair, I know that many Christians who say “follow your heart” really mean “treasure what’s really valuable.” But given how the phrase is used in pop culture, and given how the heart is used in the Bible, I think the better phrase to use, particularly with our children, is the biblical phrase “direct your heart” (1 Sam. 7:3; 1 Chr. 29:18; Prov. 23:9; 2 Thess. 3:5).
Our kids need to know that our hearts were never designed to be followed, but to be led. They need to know our hearts were never designed to be gods in whom we believe; they were designed to believe in God.
And they need to know that if they embrace our culture’s understanding of what it means to “follow your heart,” it will very likely lead them down all sorts of selfish and destructive paths, all the while telling them that they are simply being true to themselves. If Satan can keep our children’s eyes on their hearts, or what they think are their hearts, he will be able to blind them to the real treasure.
But God doesn’t want their (or our) eyes on their (or our) hearts, because hearts aren’t designed to be followed; hearts are designed to be led and directed. God wants the eyes of our children’s hearts enlightened to see the real treasure and pursue it (Eph. 1:18). He wants them to fix their eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of their faith (Heb. 12:2). God doesn’t want them to erroneously think they follow their hearts; he wants them to know they follow Jesus.
“May the Lord direct your [and your children’s] hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ” (2 Thess. 3:5).
