With All Your Heart: Orienting Your Mind, Desires, and Will toward Christ

by A. Craig Troxel

As Jonathan Edwards put it, “Without holy affection there is no true religion.”

J. R. R. Tolkien captures this idea well: “I wish I had known all this before,” said Pippen. “I had no notion of what I was doing.” “O yes, you had,” said Gandalf. “You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. . . . But if I had spoken sooner, it would not have lessened your desire, or made it easier to resist. On the contrary! No, the burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart.”

Augustine frankly admitted that there was a time when he could not sincerely pray for God’s deliverance from a favored sin, so he prayed, “‘Grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.’ For I was afraid lest Thou shouldest hear me soon, and soon deliver me from the disease of concupiscence, which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished.”

We could illustrate this point from Greek mythology.10 The sirens used their mesmerizing song to lure sailors to their deaths on the rocky shore. Two famous Greeks were able to sail by them successfully. One was Odysseus, who stopped up the ears of his men with wax and then had them bind him to the ship’s mast. This way (most of) his men were safe, and he was able to hear the siren’s sweet song with relatively little harm (Odysseus did lose six men!).11 The other was the legendary Orpheus—the greatest of all Greek musicians and poets—who was sailing with Jason and the Argonauts. As the Argonauts approached the sirens and began to hear the siren’s voices drift across the water, Orpheus took out his lyre and began to sing a more charming melody to the men. His sweeter music drowned out the sirens’ beguiling song.12 Orpheus, not Odysseus, represents the success we want. We can pass some tests by restricting our bodies (be tied to a mast) or limiting our access to temptation (fill our ears with wax). But in the end, the holy desires of our heart must arise and conquer. The desire to love and follow Christ must be a sweeter song to us than the music of the world and our flesh.

J. C. Ryle wrote, “There is nothing in your heart that the Lord Jesus cannot make right.”

John Owen said that the Lord allows that one particular sin to linger in your life because if it were not there, you would have no reason to return to God with repentant tears.

English translations of Scripture reflect the fact that the words “self-control” and “self-discipline” are often interchangeable. The Bible, however, gives a slight nuance to each of these terms. They are from the same family of spiritual fruit but of a different variety. Self-control means to restrain, hold back, or suppress (1 Cor. 7:5, 9; 9:25; 1 Tim. 2:15; 2 Pet. 1:6). For instance, Proverbs applauds the virtuous man or woman who holds back with his or her tongue (Prov. 29:11). On the other hand, self-discipline refers to the intentional, purposeful managing and determining of what we say or do. We take care to compose our thoughts, calculate our words, and direct our behavior. We choose our course with discipline.

Bringing the two ideas together means that, whereas we curb ungodly desires by self-control, we kindle holy desires with self-discipline.

If guarding the heart is of first importance, then one would expect the Bible to emphasize the gatekeepers of the heart. This is in fact the case. God teaches us about how our eyes and ears function in their special role over what gains access to our hearts.

If we want to know where a person’s heart is, we only need to listen to what he or she says.