My son, do not forget my teaching,
but let your heart keep my commandments; 

Proverbs 3:1

And so, we begin a new set of 31 Days looking for the word heart in the Old Testament book The Proverbs! I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but this is not going to be a month of ‘lovey-dovey’ pull at the emotional strings Hallmark movies. (No offense to Hallmark enthusiasts.) From a biblical perspective, there is so much more to our hearts than just our emotions and love, in-particular. 

The Hebrew word for heart is leb (H3820) and has a variety of defining words. None of them include the word ‘love’ or any specific emotion, the heart is the ‘seat of emotions and passions, but it is also ‘the seat of courage’ as we see below.

Heart in the Old Testament means:

As you can see, ‘heart’ in the Bible is deep into the soul of who we are as a created human being. It is how we think, what drives us, what we dream for our future, how we plan and how we handle success and failure. It is in the deep recesses of our heart where passions lie and how we handle those passions. Our courage doesn’t come from some flimsy whim of emotion, but courage is born and realized deep inside our being; inside our heart! In 31 Days we will only scratch the service and it may be painful as we allow God to search our own hearts and rescue us from ourselves! But the rewards of such a search and rescue mission will be precious and eternally valuable!

Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way.

Psalm 139:23-24

I look forward to digging into the profound Matters of the Heart with you!