Don’t Follow Your Heart

I just finished Thaddeus Williams’ new book, Don’t Follow Your Heart:  Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship. He offers a creative and penetrating critique of the popular quest to find your­self and fashion your own identity by looking within.

Bible readers know the genuine Ten Commandments, as recorded in Exodus 20:1-17.  And followers of Jesus recognize that he takes up and affirms (and even intensifies) God’s moral law:  hate is a kind of killing, and lust is a kind of adultery (Matthew 5:21-30).

Williams takes a Screwtape twist:  what are the foundational laws of the self-serving, sin-driven life? What commands are being kept by those who bow at the altar of self-worship?  He names ten:

*Always act to glorify and enjoy yourself forever.  *Never be out­dated.  *Obey your emotions at all costs.  *Be courageous enough to defy other people’s expectations.  *Live your truth and let others live theirs.  *Pursue the rush of boundary-free experience.  *Trust yourself and never let anyone oppress you with the notion of being a sinner.  *“Thou shalt invent and advertise thine own identity.”  *Force the universe to bend to your desires. *Celebrate all lifestyles and love-lives as equally valid.

As you ponder those “commandments,” it’s easy to see how they become intoxicating.  All that elevation of ME, magnifi­cation of ME:  makes us dizzy!  We want to be Henley’s “Invictus”:  “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

This allure swayed our first parents.  The serpent assured them (in words flagrantly contradicting God’s warning):  “You will not die” (Genesis 3:4).  But the Tempter lied, and death took hold.  And still now, the sirens of self-worship lie to us day in and day out.

Following your heart is dangerous:  “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jeremiah 17:9).  Better than looking within is looking up, into the face of Jesus.  Trust him!