Teach Your Heart

The setting was the upstairs classroom in the corner of the old building where I attended school. I was in the eighth grade. Mrs Linnum, our English teacher, said something that has impacted me all of my life. She said, “If you read something, and if you say what you read out loud, your retention increases by 80 per cent.

Well, I tried it, and you know, it worked. After reading a story for English literature, I explained it to someone and after that, I remembered it.

With the spoken word, what we say with our mouth, we can change the condition of our heart. We can change what we believe. We can change our attitude. We can change our outlook on life.

The heart, as the Bible refers to it, is the very essence of a person. The word “heart” appears 826 times in the King James Bible. The heart must be of utmost importance to God. Proverbs 4:13 says,

Keep you heart with all diligence,

For out of it spring the issues of life.

The heart contains 20,000 nerve endings. Electromagnetic fields from the heart extend out for 10 feet.

You may recall a time when you were in a room full of people and someone walked into the room who seemed to bring a cold chill with them. Someone with a bad heart can affect a whole room full of people negatively.

The opposite is true for someone with a good heart, who may bring positive feelings of happiness and lightheartedness into the room. Proverbs 17:22 says,

A merry heart does good like medicine . . .

Our heart has a great effect on those around us, so we should have great concern as to its condition. Do you have a good heart?

What we say with out mouth, what comes out of our mouth effects our heart and our attitude.

I remember a time shortly after I started the ministry. It was a leap of faith, because my family now was going to depend on God for our supply, not the traditional job with the traditional paycheck. It was a difficult time, a time of severe testing. I stayed up late some nights, pacing the floor, wondering if we were going to make it. Then, I slid into a time of depression . . . severe depression.

This is what I did. Alone in my living room, I found passages of scripture that spoke of how God sustains us and delivers us, and I walked back and forth in our living room reading them out loud. That simple exercise that was not so simple, because in my severe depression it took a deliberate effort . . . that simple exercise kept me in the game. It kept me functioning and moving forward.

When you read the Bible, you are not just reading words, as in any other book. The Bible is alive. The Bible is inseparably joined with Jesus, Himself. John 1:1 says,

“In the beginning was the word,

and the word was with God,

and the word was God.”

Jesus and the Word are the same. It’s hard to explain and it’s hard to understand, so the best thing we can do is to not labor over it, just believe it.

Hebrews 4:12 says, “For the word of God is quick and powerful . . . ” When we read the Bible, we are putting the power of God into our heart and the power of God can defeat any circumstances we might be facing in life.

It is important, not just to read the Bible, but also to do what it says. God requires righteousness from us. We cannot achieve righteousness from our good works. That’s why Jesus died on the cross for the sins of all mankind. When we receive Him into our hearts as Lord and savior, His blood cleanses us from all unrighteousness, and we are made perfect in His sight by His complete and total sacrifice.

That does not mean we can continue living like we did before we gave our lives to Him. Repentance means that we change our ways. We live righteously so far as it lies in our power to do so. That means that we make things right in our lives that were previously wrong, even those things we did before we came to Christ, if we can.

Before I gave my life to Christ, I went on a camping trip on the lake shore with some friends. There was a cabin down the shore not far from our camping site and we got the bright idea we should break into it. There was not much of value in the cabin, but we decided to raid the man’s tackle box.

After I came to Christ, every time I opened my tackle box, there was a red and white dare devil that I had taken from the man’s tackle box, staring up at me. That summer, the man came back to the area with his wife for a vacation. That dare devil was weighing heavily on my conscience. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Finally, I put it in a little envelope and paid a visit to the man, explaining to him what we boys had done. He was very gracious and he thanked me for returning the dare devil.

When I left the cabin that day, I fairly skipped my way to the car, feeling light as a feather.

Teach your heart. Read the Bible out loud. By doing so, you will be putting the word of God into your heart.

…And don’t forget to do what it says. If you do that, you will be one step ahead in your Christian walk.

Photo designed and taken by Lorraine