I would not exactly call myself a fan of censorship; I think the First Amendment happens to be one of the crowning achievements of the democratic experiment that is the United States of America. But if in days to come our culture steamrolled this bulwark of American freedom, I do have some suggestions as to where we should start. We ought to begin with prohibiting use of the phrase “listen to your heart” in all its various formulations.
I can hear the objections in the air: What would become of the Hallmark Channel, animated films, or the greeting card market if we made such a move? Would a single romantic comedy enter production in the wake of an act so bold? To be sure, the Disney market share plummet alone would send investors into a tailspin. Consider this incomplete list of films that would need to be removed from shelves and streaming platforms as a result: Pocahontas, Brave, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Mulan, Moana, Frozen, Encanto, Cinderella, Tangled, The Princess and the Frog, and Soul, all of which contain the message of trusting—indeed, idolizing—yourself at your core.
Listen to your heart, follow your heart, the answer to your problems lies inside you, and many more constructions of this idea are plentiful in our culture and are strikingly prevalent in the entertainment that we pour into our children’s hearts and minds, but it is some of the worst advice. The weeping prophet gives us these words in Jeremiah 17:9:
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
What would Jeremiah think of the chorus of that 1988 number one hit “Listen to Your Heart”?
Listen to your heart when he’s calling for you
Listen to your heart, there’s nothing else you can do.1
If the officials of King Zedekiah sincerely wanted to make Jeremiah miserable, they could have piped Roxette into his jail cell instead of merely casting him into a well!
Our culture—indeed, the church itself—needs godly counsel on matters of the heart, and this guidance is found abundantly in Psalm 103. We are going to walk through these twenty-two verses in two parts, beginning with this direction: Command your praise.
David begins Psalm 103 with part 1 of the divine remedy to self-followership—no fluff and no introduction:
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and all that is within me,
bless his holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my soul. (vv. 1–2)
It is short, to the point, and does not need to be framed or cleaned up. This is the command, the inoculation against our wayward tendency to worship self: Soul, are you listening to me? Bless the Lord! My wife and I have three small children, so like us, anyone with kids (or you former kids) will understand the plain, simple way in which this command is laid down. Kids, like our souls, need clear expectations. They need to be told exactly what they need to do, by when, and, if you are feeling generous, why. If your directions are unclear, too long, or conflicting, then the results of your efforts will often be the exact opposite of what you have envisioned. David could not make things clearer if he wanted to. “Listen up soul, you have one job, and this is it: Bless the Lord, praise the Lord.” The command is given to us again in the conclusion of Psalm 103; thus, this order forms bookends for the poem:
Bless the Lord, O you his angels,
you mighty ones who do his word,
obeying the voice of his word!
Bless the Lord, all his hosts,
his ministers, who do his will!
Bless the Lord, all his works,
in all places of his dominion.
Bless the Lord, O my soul! (vv. 20–22)
The final verses include in this command not just the soul of the worshiper but all things everywhere.
Here the Scripture, the holy and inspired Word of God, calls us over as a loving parent, says “Look at me,” and gives us this simple instruction: Bless your God. Why? Is this not what all things were created for? The cosmos is a manifestation of the power, creativity, and beauty of the Lord. The towering snowy peaks of the world reveal the might of Yahweh. The nurturing way a songbird watches over her young pours forth the tender kindness of our Creator. Was I created to do anything else, for any greater purpose than this? Isaiah 43:6–7 answers,
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the end of the earth,
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.
This call to praise and adore our God is more clear for humanity than it is for the mountains, the oceans, and the creatures that wander all across the face of the earth because, unlike every other thing that has been created, we alone were created in the image of the One who built it all.
Further, praise is not just our privilege but our responsibility. Paraphrased, the Westminster Confession 2.2 says this: “God does not need any of the creatures he has made, he does not derive glory from them, but instead he manifests his glory in by and upon them.”
In other words, the divine act of creation was not motivated by loneliness. Nor did Yahweh create the world because he needed approval, as if he were vain, yearning for appreciation as an embittered spouse yearns to hear a sincere “thank you.” He created the world to show his character to us, to magnify his own glory in, by, and on us. This may appear as vanity to our eyes, but it is decidedly not. We can be vain. If I were to build a statue of myself outside my house, buy the biggest mansion I could find, and park my airplane out front just to tell people how successful I have been, that would be vanity, for the day is coming when I will die. Bigger airplanes and nicer houses wait to be sold, and our meager accomplishments fade away, overcome by the greater accomplishments of others. If I magnify myself, that is vanity. I am not the smartest, the wealthiest, or the most talented person ever to live. Men are capable of vanity because they are qualitatively different from God. God is not simply smarter or more powerful than I am; he is the source of wisdom and the fount of all power that exists. He is not just quantitatively different but qualitatively different from us. It would be vain for anyone else in the universe to demand praise because we are all finite, created beings. God alone is the uncreated, ever-existing one. Thus, our praise to him is not only right but required.
Context reveals this question: Why do we need this command? If I called my kids to tell them to do something, there is a reason why. There is something wrong that I want them to change, something I need them to do. Perhaps there are toys all over the floor that need to be picked up, the volume of the living room is too loud, they are being unkind to one another—the command comes because there is something going on that needs rectification.
Jeremiah submits that the heart of man is the problem. All created things in the heavens above and on the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth pour forth praise to the Lord simply by doing exactly what God created them to do— all things except one. Birds rehearse their sweet songs, bees pollinate flowers, rocks sit as foundations for soaring mountains because God designed them to do just that, but the height of the created order designed to reflect his glory more fully than any other creature puts his trust in himself and magnifies the creature rather than the Creator. The command to bless the Lord is necessary because our fallen hearts are prone to treasonously seek our own glory instead of his.
We should bless the Lord in our affections, seeking to love what he loves and delight in what pleases him. We should not laugh at things he hates. The Lord hates sin with perfect hatred, but we shrug it off. It is not that bad, we think. We should be a people dominated by gratitude, constrained by thankfulness. Christians should long for worship on Sunday mornings rather than anxiously checking their watches to see whether they will make it home in time to watch the Vikings lose (again). How good is our God to us, providing for our every need? From his sovereign hand, every good and perfect gift comes. How often should we take thanksgiving on our lips, praising God for every day—for every beat of our heart and breath in our lungs. Instead, we are far too often like Israel, scowling because the divinely provided manna is not exactly what we crave. We look at our spouses and think, “I wish this or that were different” instead of saying, “Oh, Lord, thank you for this beautiful gift of a husband or a wife.” But this is not normal for our fallen nature, which is much more like Dudley Dursley than we would like to admit.
Do you remember him? Dudley was the boy in the Harry Potter series, the son of the two characters who allowed Harry to stay with them as quasi-adoptive parents. In the first book, the Dursley family is celebrating Dudley’s birthday. The boy races out of his bedroom to see the gifts quietly stacked in the living room, counts them, and looks up with a miserable grimace and says, “Thirty-six, that’s two less than last year!”2 What I dislike the most about Dudley Dursley is that I can see myself in him. I recall boyhood Christmas mornings, the memory of which is marred by my ingratitude. Instead of praising God for his provision, we give safe harbor to defiling notions: I deserve a higher-paying job, a kinder spouse, a nicer house, better food. I deserve better; God is failing to care for me the way he should! We see his bountiful provision everywhere we look and say “not good enough.” This is why David commands his own soul to humbly worship the Lord. Christians cannot follow their fallen hearts but need to steward them. We need to command our souls, command our affections, order all that is within us to submit in humility to the Lord, offering the praise he is due, not through gritted teeth but with sincerity.
This is a hard command. David knows this; the Lord knows this. It is a difficult thing to steward our hearts in gratitude. Because our Father abounds in steadfast love and his faithfulness knows no bounds, the psalmist does not stop here with “Just do it,” as though imitating a Nike commercial. Instead, the Lord is kind to offer us the second part of the remedy in an article to come, “Command Your Memory.”
Notes
- “Listen to Your Heart,” by Per Gessie and Mats Persson, track 2 on Look Sharp!, recorded August 1988, Parlophone/EMI.
- J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), 21.
©Seth Adams. All Rights Reserved.
You can find the whole series here.
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Zach Keele
Rev. Zachary Keele grew up on a ranch in a small town named Crawford, Colorado. He attended Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania and received his Master of Divinity from Westminster Seminary California. He has served as the pastor of Escondido OPC since 2006.
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