“We need to live from our heart, not our head.” Ever hear that saying? It has been around for decades. There’s an underlying truth to it. Unfortunately, the way it gets expressed implies a false and damaging polarity instead of a balance.

The heart and intellect are not incompatible. Far from it! Living fully and wisely from our heart involves using our head, and problems arise when we emphasize either at the expense of the other. I know because I’ve lived on both ends of the spectrum. Here is what I’ve found:

• The mind is not where life dwells. To emphasize it at the expense of the heart is to experience less than the abundant life Jesus offers us.
• However, to scorn the mind is to ignore a vital part of our being. God gave us our mind with the intent that we should love him with it just as we do with our heart.

Some church cultures I once moved in distrusted the intellect and even maligned it. I didn’t fit in well because I didn’t know how not to think, and to process, and to question, and even to (gasp!) disagree. I didn’t know how not to mentally engage with the Scriptures and ponder how they connected with life. I didn’t know how not to think about how people, including me, are put together, and about what God himself is like.

I just couldn’t seem to shut off my thinker. I didn’t know how.

It finally dawned on me that those who emphasized heart over head didn’t know how either. They just didn’t realize, or perhaps didn’t want to admit, that they thought a certain way about the mind, and they had become set in their thinking. They used their minds to reinforce their negative view of the mind, not recognizing the irony.

Their wrong thinking about thinking had an unhealthy influence on the way I lived as a believer. And I was wrong to let it.

The Mind Really Matters

The intellect is not the source of life, merely a gateway to it. Apart from the heart, the mind is lifeless. It is as capable of self-deception and idolatry as it is of getting at truth. It takes the heart to make facts and concepts bubble up into life inside us, resulting in a rich inner world that overflows with the Holy Spirit.

But that reality has a vital counterpart. It is this: You had darn well better learn to think for yourself, because if you don’t, someone else–a person, a group of people, even a religious or doctrinal subculture–is going to think for you. And when that happens, you will run into trouble. Because cloneliness is not next to godliness; the two are a world apart.

We are complex creatures who are to “love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart, mind, and strength”–in other words, with all that we are, to the best that we are granted. The mix of that three-part combination is different for every person, but we cannot shut off any of those aspects of our being. It’s impossible.

In this life, we simply are physical, spiritual, and, yes, mental.

As long as we are alive and conscious, we are thinking, always. We can have right thinking. We can have wrong thinking. But we can’t have no thinking.

The Mind Informs the Heart. The Heart Guides the Mind.

Some of us are intuitive and passionate by nature. Others lean toward the intellectual. But whichever way is our bent, we all need some degree of the other way for balance; otherwise, we’re either a loose hose or an empty hose. God intends our mind and our heart to work symbiotically, complementing each other. Neither can be shut off, only stifled in a misguided attempt to be a “better Christian.”

Only the grace of Jesus makes us any kind of Christian at all. If we attempt to improve on that grace by emphasizing one God-given aspect of our humanity at the expense of another, we’ll only experience less than the full, free life our Father intends for us: a life vitally connected to him that causes our thinking to align with his, and that shapes our heart according to his own.