God is Greater Than Our
Hearts
I once owned a car with a broken gas gauge. When the tank was empty, the needle pointed
to “E.” When the tank was half-full, the
gauge still read empty. When the gas
tank was filled to overflowing, the needle budged just a little, moving
slightly to the right of the empty mark.
No matter how much fuel was in that car’s tank, the gauge gave me the
same message, “Your tank is empty.”
I learned
that gauge was not a reliable indicator of how much fuel was in my gas
tank. I learned to disregard its
message. I also devised another way to
assess how much fuel was in the tank. I
found a long stick I could slide through the nozzle into the tank, then pull it
out to see how much of the stick was wet with gasoline. You could call it a literal “dipstick” for my
gas tank. It wasn’t fancy or stylish,
but it worked and helped me work around the false message of a broken
gauge.
Human
emotions are a kind of gauge of the heart, an indicator of the fullness or
emptiness of our lives and relationships.
When feelings are working well, they help us experience life fully and
warn us when some aspect of our lives are running low. The problem with feelings is that they are a
gauge that sometimes gets broken. When
you are in a season of depression, your feelings can give you all the wrong
feedback. Like my broken gas gauge,
feelings hijacked by depression can give you a constant message of
emptiness. You may read that flawed
feeling as:
My life is a total
wreck.
No one loves or
respects me.
I am a complete
failure.
I cannot be right with
God and feel this way.
What do you do when you realize that your emotional gauges
are broken? First, you must learn to
question the meaning of what you feel.
When you know your emotions are depressed, you must fight the tendency
to accept that empty feeling as an accurate appraisal of your life. Second, you must find another way to measure
the fullness or emptiness of your life, a kind of emotional and spiritual
dipstick to help you work around feelings that aren’t giving you a true reading.
The letter of 1 John offers you and me a tool that can help us get beyond our
broken emotional gauges.
There
is a sure way for us to know that we belong to the truth. Even though our inner thoughts may condemn us with
storms of guilt and constant
reminders of our failures, we
can know in our hearts that in His presence God Himself is greater than any accusation. He knows all things.
1
John 3:19-20, The Voice
God is greater than our hearts. What God says about who we are and our
standing with Him is a faithful measure of the truth. God knows everything about why our feelings
are giving us false messages. He also
knows that His love for us and faithfulness to us do not depend on our
feelings.
This passage
also means that God is a higher authority than our hearts in determining where
we stand with Him. When feelings are
broken, we may feel far from God, unable to pray, far short of the purpose we
believe God has for our lives. But our
feelings are not the final authority.
They do not have the last word.
God is greater than our hearts.
We are who God says we are, no matter what we feel.
Prayer
Loving Father, my
feelings are so broken right now. They
tell me I’m far from You and useless to the people around me. Teach me that You are greater than my heart. Help me to trust Your Word and Your promises
about who I am as Your beloved child. I
praise You that You are greater than my heart.
Amen.
This is an excerpt from my book, Seeing in the Dark: Biblical Meditations for People Dealing with Depression.