The Immeasurable Significance of a Single Human Heart
It is not kingdoms, the tides of history, popular movements, great leaders, or revolutions that are ultimately significant. These things have their place—but what is ultimately significant is the human heart.
Human hearts last forever; they will exist for eternity in a state of bliss or misery as they enter heaven or hell. They are the battlefields of good and evil, and it requires the greatest power in the world to change one heart.
The glory of God is seen when a single human heart is transformed. Evil is at its most destructive not when it plunges a country into war or destroys a civilization, but when it brings down a human heart.
We know this is true because the most ultimate reality is not political or cultural, but spiritual. History records entire nations and kingdoms that often merit no more than a passing paragraph in a book, and sometimes just a single footnote in a dusty tome. Millions may have lived and died in that empire, yet it is completely nonexistent today. But a single human heart, though forgotten on earth, is eternally significant and continues to exist in the present time.
Another evidence of the significance of the human heart is its influence. A single person’s influence may affect someone else in such a way as to have far-reaching results never imagined before. A childhood bully may so wreck a human heart as to give rise, in the coming generation, to a new Hitler or Stalin; a single act of love may so encourage a man as to turn his life around and plant seeds of hope for thousands. The influences and pressures upon a single human heart, and its development from them, are ultimately of greater meaning than all the elections, decrees, and fashions of earthly governments and cultures.
For what are society and culture but the accumulation of millions of human hearts? Politicians and governments are not the starting point of human change; they are merely the result of influenced hearts. Revolutions never herald new ways of thought and life; they are only the rising to the surface of thoughts and ideas that have lain dormant in human hearts and have finally gained such momentum that they rise to the surface.
This means we should be far more interested in the influences that affect human hearts than in the politics and movements that sweep across the globe. Who knows whether this companion or that book will so affect a heart as to result in eternal ruin or inexpressible good? What goes on within the recesses—whether the heart is hardened or softened, whether it ingests truth or falsehood, what pours into it and what pours out of it—all of this is the measure of reality, not the killing fields of Ukraine or the power-halls of Washington.
It is this recognition which will keep us from overvaluing political movements, military campaigns, legislative decisions, and Supreme Court rulings. This reality also causes us to see the inestimable value of the little things: Bible studies, the reading of a good book, the quiet fragments of time collected in private prayer.
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