Second of two reflections on the sweetest song. The first is A Better Music.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have being.— Psalm 104:33
“Mommy, did you know your heart is the most beautiful thing in your body?”
She said it the way four-year-olds say things. Completely certain, no qualifications, no footnotes. Just the fact, delivered like it was obvious.
She is seventeen now, and I am still thinking about what she said at four. Children say true things before they learn to qualify them.
Last time we left a sailor in the water.
Orpheus was playing on the deck of the Argo, the Sirens were singing from the island, and one man named Butes went over the side and swam for the rocks. He heard the same music everyone else heard. Something in him was listening past it.
That is where this has to go next. If two men can stand in the same place, hearing the same song, and end up in different water, then the deciding thing is not the music. It is whatever in us receives it.
Scripture has a word for that.
Not the organ that pumps blood, but the seat of everything that makes us who we are. What we love. What we fear. What we worship. The Hebrew word לֵב (lev) and its longer form לֵבָב (levav) appear well over eight hundred times in the Old Testament. It is where decisions are made, where faith lives or dies, where God looks when He looks at us.
He is not interested in the surface. He never has been. The Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7).
And Proverbs does not say guard your reputation, or guard your theology, or guard your behavior.
Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. — Proverbs 4:23
Springs. Not a vault to be sealed but a source that everything downstream depends on. Whatever gets into the spring ends up in the water, eventually, everywhere the water goes.
Butes did not fall overboard because the Sirens outplayed Orpheus. He fell because of what was already running in him before the ship ever reached that island.
Here is what I find extraordinary. God, who spoke the universe into existence and holds every atom together, chose not to reach in and arrange the inside of us.
He could have. He didn’t.
Which means the guarding is ours to do. Paul writes, set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth (Colossians 3:2). Commands are not given to creatures with no choice in the matter.
I find that both freeing and uncomfortable. Freeing, because it means my heart is genuinely mine. Uncomfortable, because it means no one else is going to guard it for me. Not my church, not my upbringing, not the good habits I picked up somewhere along the way.
Aphrodite caught Butes. And I am grateful that the Spirit who lives in us is not a Greek goddess who happens to love us, but an Advocate who stays. He will not abandon the spring. But the guarding is still mine to do, and His presence does not make it easier to be careless. It makes it matter more.
And something in us was made for more than what we can reach. The writer of Ecclesiastes says God has put eternity into man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The Hebrew is עוֹלָם (olam), and translators have never fully agreed on it. Eternity. The ages. A sense of time stretching past what we can see. Whatever the precise shade, the verse is saying we carry something too large to be filled by what is at hand. Which is why nothing finite ever fully satisfies. Not for long.
So the heart will be filled. That is not a weakness in the design. That is the design. The only question is what gets there first and what stays.
God's most extraordinary gift was not a set of rules for the heart to follow or a list of things for it to avoid. It was a Person. His name is Jesus, and He is the sweetest song the heart has ever heard. When the Psalmist writes I will sing to the Lord as long as I live, that is not duty. Nobody sings for a lifetime out of obligation. That is a heart that found what it was looking for and cannot stop saying so.
My daughter was right, though not for the reason a four-year-old could have explained. The heart is the most beautiful thing. Not because of what it is on its own, but because of what it was made to hold.
We spend so much of our lives managing the outside. What we say, how we appear, what we follow when someone is watching. And all the while, God is looking at something else entirely.
He is looking at the spring. And He is waiting to fill it.
*Give Him the inside. *The water will take care of the rest.
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