What Are You Filling Your Heart With?
"The LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart." — 1 Samuel 16:7b
Dear friends,
What is the last thing you hold before you fall asleep, and the first thing you reach for when you wake? For many of us, it is the phone. There is nothing wrong with checking the time. But so often we begin the day by filling our still-sleepy minds with everything that gathered overnight — the news, the messages, the videos someone thought we should see.
The algorithms keep showing us more of what we have already watched, and the news does the same, quietly placing before us the views we have looked for before. So, we live in a flood of information — but not a flood in which everything arrives equally. It is shaped by our own habits and preferences. And little by little something shifts in us: deciding who is on our side can begin to matter more than discerning what is right. As it pours in around the clock, the distance between people grows, and our hearts fill up with worry, anger, and hostility toward one another. What, then, are we filling our inner lives with?
When Samuel came to anoint a king from the house of Jesse, he was drawn to the oldest son, Eliab — tall and impressive. But God said, "The LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart" (1 Samuel 16:7). The Hebrew word for heart here, lebab, means more than our feelings; it is the center of a person, where thought, will, and decision come together. And the one God chose was David, the youngest, still out in the fields tending the sheep. It is worth noticing where David's heart had been formed. Long before he stood before a giant, he had spent countless quiet hours in the fields — watching the flock, singing to God, learning to trust the One no one else could see. His courage did not appear all at once on the battlefield; it had been growing quietly, day after day, in God's presence. So, when Goliath stood before him and the army trembled, David could say, "I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts" (1 Samuel 17:45). A giant stood before him, but within him was a God far greater — because that is what he had been filling his heart with all along.
Our hearts are no different. They are shaped by what we hold within us each day, what we give our attention to, what we trust. So, it is worth asking honestly: What am I filling myself with? What has taken the center of my heart? The stories on our screens can leave us anxious and quick to grow hard toward one another. The Word of God does something else: it quiets us, steadies us, and leads us to love again. The headlines of today will be forgotten by next week, but the Word of God remains forever. So here is one small invitation. Before you reach for your phone in the morning, come first to the Word of God — five minutes, ten minutes are enough. What we take in shapes our thoughts, and our thoughts shape our words and our actions. Those first quiet minutes, given to God, reach all the way into how we speak to the person across the table and how we regard the neighbor we disagree with. A heart filled each morning with God's Word does not stay hidden — it spills out, gently, into the way we treat one another.
God is still looking today — not at our outward appearance, but at our hearts. Day by day, let us fill them with him.
Blessings,
Pastor JD