What Is in Our Hearts Is What Leads Us
Scripture teaches that human life does not start with outward circumstances, but with what fills the heart. Our decisions, our words, our reactions, our faith or unbelief – all of this flows from the depths of the inner person. What we allow into our hearts and what we feed them with day after day will sooner or later become the direction of our entire life. What we pour into our hearts today will determine what “land” we will enter tomorrow.
God delights in soft hearts. He once promised: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). At the same time Scripture repeatedly warns us: “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness” (Hebrews 3:8). Hardness of heart is not a lightning strike, but a process. A person rarely becomes hard in a single day. Much more often the heart grows calloused through grumbling, resentment and inner rebellion, when again and again we choose not to trust God, but to complain against Him and against people.
One of the most dangerous sources of hardening, according to the Bible, is gossip, slander and false accusation, especially against pastors, leaders, brothers and sisters in the faith. We may treat this as something “not so serious”, but the spiritual world responds to words very seriously. When we receive an evil report, when we allow suspicion and distrust to take root in the heart, it quietly becomes covered with a crust. Gratitude to God and to people is replaced by hidden tension: we no longer see a gift and a grace in our leaders, and we no longer see a blessing in the congregation. Yet God has arranged things so that we need one another: there is no pastor without a flock and no flock without a pastor, and over all of us stands Yeshua, our Great Shepherd.
The Lord did not build His body according to the schemes of human ambition, but according to His own calling. He Himself appoints apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers in His Church. But alongside true servants there will always be self-appointed ones – people who decided on their own that they could “do something for God”, and began to act without anointing, without being sent, without submission to the Holy Spirit. There are also those who distort the very foundation of faith, denying the deity of Yeshua or rejecting the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Bible says that with a stubborn heretic who refuses to repent, after two warnings we are not to continue fellowship, so as not to become partakers of “the unfruitful works of darkness”. Not because we are righteous in ourselves, but because God is jealous for the purity of the heart and of the faith.
God is patient and abounding in mercy. He waits, giving a person time to turn back. But His patience is not His approval of sin. We can always return, because it is written: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Yet when a person stubbornly clings to offense, criticism and hidden rebellion, when he refuses to acknowledge his own wrongdoing, the heart becomes hard. At that point it is not God who shuts Himself off from us, but we who shut ourselves off from Him.
There is another sphere where the state of the heart is tested – life-shaping decisions. To marry or not, to have children, to move to another congregation, to relocate to another city or country, to start a new ministry – these are not routine steps. These are decisions that radically change the course of life. If, at such moments, a person is guided only by emotions, by hurt, by disappointment or by a desire to “prove something to everyone”, he steps into a territory where he himself will pay the price for his choices. God longs to guide us, but for that the heart must be soft and willing to obey, ready not only to ask for blessing, but also to listen to what the Lord is saying.
To show how deeply the condition of the heart affects destiny, Scripture gives us the story of the twelve spies in the book of Numbers. God had already given Israel a promise about the Promised Land. At the Lord’s command Moses sent from each tribe its head – men who were closest to God’s glory, who had seen miracles and signs, who had gone up the mountain and received God’s word. They all saw the same land, the same cities, the same giants. Yet they returned with two completely different messages, because their hearts were filled with different things.
Ten leaders, captured by fear and inner unbelief, brought back an evil report: a land that “devours those living in it”, people stronger than we are, and “we were in our own sight as grasshoppers”. Their words reflected their inner world: they saw reality not through the promises of God, but through the magnifying glass of their own fears. Murmuring and panic spread through the entire people, and one night of weeping became the beginning of forty years of wandering in the desert. This is the power of negative confession: when the heart is filled with fear and discontent, the lips inevitably begin to speak destruction into a person’s destiny.
Caleb and Joshua looked at the same land, the same walls and the same giants, but their hearts were saturated with something else. They declared that the land was “exceeding good”, and they testified that if the Lord delighted in them, He would bring them into it, pleading with the people: “Only rebel not ye against the LORD” (see Numbers 14). They did not deny the existence of difficulties, but they placed God’s promise above visible reality. In their spirit another truth was sounding, one that would later be expressed this way: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13). They understood that victory rests not on their own strength, but on the faithfulness of God.
This leads us to an important reflection about our words and our inner thought life. A person who keeps repeating, “I am sick”, “I will never succeed”, “I will never have enough”, gradually builds an atmosphere of defeat around himself. Even his prayers can turn into a confirmation of unbelief if they focus more on the problem than on God. By contrast, the one who clings to God’s promises is aligning himself with heaven. It is written: “For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us” (2 Corinthians 1:20). Grace does not cancel our responsibility; it gives us power to live in agreement with God’s Word instead of being held captive by our fears and our habitual complaints.
We also need to speak about our ability to receive correction. Scripture teaches that if you rebuke a wise person, he will become wiser still, but a foolish person will take offense and carry resentment in his heart. Spiritual maturity is not shown by the absence of mistakes, but by how we respond to them. A person with a soft heart can go through a difficult conversation, yet afterward he will come to God, admit his wrong and allow the Holy Spirit to change him. A person with a hardened heart turns any correction into a reason for inner judgment, offense and distance. Then it is resentment, not the Holy Spirit, that begins to guide his decisions.
The true mark of discipleship is not our ability to argue theology, but love. Yeshua said: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). And He also said: “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:14). Love for brothers and sisters, loyalty to one’s congregation, respect for leaders, willingness to live in accountability – these are not “optional extras”, but genuine expressions of obedience to the Messiah. Wherever criticism, constant suspicion and a desire to “take everybody apart” settle in the heart, friendship with Yeshua slowly gives way to inner loneliness and spiritual dryness.
When someone has lived in negativity for a long time, there comes a moment, as it did for the prophet Isaiah, when he suddenly sees his true condition: “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). But this is not the end; it is the beginning of healing. God does not reveal our uncleanness in order to crush us, but in order to cleanse us. A coal from the altar touches the lips, and where complaints, gossip and unbelief once sounded, worship and faith begin to flow. That is why a strong call to repentance is always an expression of God’s love, not of condemnation. The Lord longs for us to repent of gossip and slander, of forgotten promises, of allowing circumstances to overshadow His faithfulness.
The story of the exodus generation shows that God’s will was good, pleasing and perfect – to bring His people into the promised land. Yet most of them remained in the wilderness not because God changed His mind, but because they stubbornly clung to their unbelief. They themselves said, “It would have been better for us to die in Egypt or in this wilderness”, they themselves decided that their children would become prey to the enemy, and they themselves chose a leader to take them back. Their future was shaped by their own words and by the state of their hearts. It is the same today: God desires to give His children blessings – strong families, saved children, open doors in ministry, provision, and opportunities to influence others for His Kingdom. But He does not force our will and He does not remove our responsibility for what we feed our hearts with.
God says that the earth is full of His glory. The problem is not a lack of glory, but that the eyes of our hearts often do not see it. When a person is inwardly disappointed, he notices only “manure” everywhere: other people’s mistakes, the imperfections of ministry, difficulties and conflicts. But the one who learns to look with the eyes of faith sees something different. He believes for revival even when he sees only a few burning hearts. He expects healing even when circumstances say the opposite. He knows that “we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). Such a person does not ignore reality, but refuses to let reality dictate his faith.
Today the Holy Spirit gently yet persistently asks each of us: what is leading you – the promises of God or inner murmuring, faith or suspicion, gratitude or hidden bitterness? Whom do you open your heart to, whose words do you give space to on the inside? God promised to turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers: “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6). This means that He deeply cares about what is going on in our inner world – in our families, in our congregations, between generations.
God is calling us back to His Word and to a renewed mind. Wherever we once agreed with a spirit of criticism and unbelief, today we can agree with the Word of God. Where we used to say, “Nothing will work out”, God’s “yes” and “amen” can now be heard. Where our hands were hanging down, we can raise them again in worship. Where we lived only on memories of old promises, we can take hold of those promises afresh and say: Lord, I choose to trust You in spite of everything I see. When the heart is filled with God’s promises, a person ceases to be a prisoner of circumstances and becomes a participant in God’s plan.
Let this truth sink deep within us: what is in our hearts is what leads us. If our hearts are filled with gratitude, trust, obedience and love, we will move forward – even through deserts – toward the promised land the Lord has prepared. But if our hearts are filled with murmuring, gossip and suspicion, our path will lead us in circles until we acknowledge our condition and allow God once again to make our hearts soft. He is faithful. He is ready to forgive, to heal and to renew. The choice remains with us – to give Him our hearts and allow Him to lead us into the place where all His good purposes for our lives are fulfilled.
Pastor Oren lev Ari