Greater Than My Heart

Her heart gives the same verdict every day and it has never once been open to appeal.

I want to describe the court accurately, because I think you sit in it. It convenes without warning. It has no fixed hour, though it prefers early mornings and the twenty minutes after somebody says something ordinary and kind to her. There is no prosecutor, because there does not need to be. Her own heart delivers the finding directly, in about four words, and the four words are always the same, and they land with the weight of something settled rather than something argued.

And here is the thing that has undone her for three years. She has tried to appeal it, and every appeal is heard by the same court.

She reasons with herself. She lists the evidence on the other side. She thinks about what she would say to a friend in the identical position, and she can produce a whole warm speech for that friend, and she means every word of it for that friend. Then she turns and offers the same speech to herself and her heart declines to accept it, and the verdict stands, and she is back where she began.

She is not being dramatic. She would be embarrassed by the word court. If you asked her what is wrong she would say she just does not feel right about herself and change the subject.

But that is what it is. A tribunal of one, sitting daily, hearing its own appeals, upholding its own findings.

And a person cannot get out of that by thinking harder, because the thinking happens inside the courtroom.

That is you in the chair.

You've got a verdict you cannot argue with, delivered by an authority you cannot go over the head of, because the authority is you. And three years of appeals have gone to the same bench and come back the same way.

John writes the one sentence that goes over your heart's head

Here is the verse, and I want to teach it in the order the sentence puts things, because the order is doing the work.

For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.1 John 3:20

If our heart condemn us. John opens by conceding it. He does not argue with the fact that this happens, and he does not tell you your heart is wrong to feel what it feels. He starts by admitting the court exists and sits.

Then: God is greater than our heart. Greater. That is a word about jurisdiction. Your heart is not the highest authority in this matter, and John says so directly, which means every appeal you have made has been filed in the wrong building.

You are under a higher authority than your own heart, and the verdict it keeps handing down was never the final one, and I am not softening what you feel: 1 John 3:20 says God is greater, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can carry that into a court that has sat daily for three years.

Now the third clause, and this is the one that took me years to see. And knoweth all things.

Think about why that is there. Your heart condemns you on partial information. It has the parts you remember most vividly, the parts that replay, the worst reading of the parts that are ambiguous. It does not have everything. Nobody's does.

God is greater, and God knows all things, and John puts those two together deliberately. He is not saying God overrules your heart out of kindness while your heart has the facts right. He is saying God overrules it and is better informed than it is.

You have been sentenced on a partial file by a court with no jurisdiction, and the higher bench has the whole of it, which is written into the second and third clauses rather than being my encouragement, with the Spirit of God able to lift a woman out of a room she has never been able to argue her way out of.

Here is where I want to be precise, because doctrine that does not move a body is not worth much. Nobody is telling you to stop feeling what you feel. Your heart will convene again on Thursday and it will say the same four words. What has changed is where the matter gets decided. You do not have to win the argument in that room. You have to know the room is not the last one.

This is settled above your own heart, on a full file, by Someone greater, because Scripture puts greater and knoweth all things in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that onto a veranda after the rain.