Heart Sermon Ideas

In the Bible, the heart is the seat of emotion and desire and is especially the governing center. The heart represents human beings at their core, their fundamental orientation to life. In sermon, prayer, and liturgy, we can explore and amplify this idea of the heart as representing the core or essence of a person.

What does the Bible say about the heart?

Use these prefiltered searches to craft sermons and prayers, offer pastoral care, or plan worship services around the theme of the heart.

Sermon ideas about the heart

Biblical language of the heart

A sermon or homily on the heart can point out that biblical language about human beings is neither scientific nor merely careless. It's popular religious language that employs rough synonyms (soul, spirit, mind, and heart partially overlap in meaning but have distinct connotations) and lots of synecdoche—using the part to speak of the whole. Thus, instead of discussing a person in her fundamental orientation to life, you simply speak of her heart. Instead of saying that a person has integrity, you speak simply of her heart: it's "clean," or it's "pure." Instead of saying that people are deeply corrupt, you say that the human heart is devious or perverse.

Heart language in the Bible often suggests the flux of emotion: hearts may desire, be troubled, be calmed, be hardened, be softened, or be moved.

The prevailing use of heart language in the Bible is for the governing center of human beings. This is where the person's motives, desires, will, and dispositions lie. The heart is the person at his essence, at her core. In the heart are the "springs" of life—the motives, the movers of life. So to have a pure heart means that much else in life will be healthy and right. To have a devious heart is to have a devious life—devious practices, devious habits, devious character.

The heart, the governing center, is at bottom unfathomable. This can be seen with respect to both good hearts and bad ones. In the case of good hearts, common grace causes surprises. A guy with a pickup truck may have fought with his wife one Thursday. He may have yelled at his kid and stressed himself out over his $12-an-hour job and tight finances. But then he hears of a flood in another state, drops everything, and drives to the flood site. He fills, hefts, and transports sandbags all night to protect people he does not know. Looked at from a domestic angle, his heart seems unhealthy. Looked at from a public service angle, it looks wonderful.

In the case of believers, all the desires and motives of the heart are influenced by the fact that Jesus Christ is resident in it. At least a good deal of the time Jesus is the prime mover in the believer's life. This is no minor mystery—that the Lord who seems to be "back there" in history or "up there" in heaven is actually as close to me as inside my rib cage.

A heart with Christ in it is unfathomable. Was it I who welcomed an immigrant family even when it was inconvenient? Or was it Christ in me? A sermon about the heart can explore this question.

A heart empty of Christ

A heart that is empty of Christ is also unfathomable. Ask a thief who preys on confused elderly people why he does it, and he'll say (if candid for a moment), "I want their money, and cheating them seems to be the only way to get it." But why is he willing to break the law and hurt elderly people? Because he wanted their money more than their peace of mind. But why? Because he is selfish. But why be selfish if it causes vulnerable people so much grief? Because, as the filmmaker Woody Allen once said, trying to defend his affair with the young daughter of his wife Mia Farrow, "The heart wants what it wants."

That's the conversation stopper. The imperial heart overrules all. It is unfathomable. As Jeremiah says, who can understand it?

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