You Are What You Love

If you asked most Christians what defines a person, they’d say something like: you are what you believe. Get your doctrine straight, and the rest follows. I believed that for years. I don’t anymore — not because doctrine doesn’t matter, but because it isn’t actually the deepest thing driving you. Your loves are.

Where Your Feet Actually Go

Think about your own life for a second. You can believe exercise is good for you and still not go to the gym. You can believe a relationship is unhealthy and still not walk away. You can believe generosity matters and still grip your money tight. Belief alone doesn’t move your feet. Desire does. We don’t live out of the ideas in our head nearly as much as we live out of the things we love — the things we ache for, orient our schedules around, and picture when we imagine a good life.

Guard Your Heart, Not Just Your Head

Solomon knew this three thousand years before anyone wrote a book about it.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

— Proverbs 4:23

Not “guard your theology,” though that matters too. Guard your heart — the seat of your loves, your desires, your deepest allegiances. Everything else in your life flows downstream from what that heart is set on.

Loves Can Be Trained

Here’s the hope in all this: loves aren’t fixed. They’re formed, which means they can be re-formed. Every habit you practice is quietly teaching your heart what to want. That’s why the historic Christian practices — prayer, Scripture, the Lord’s Table, corporate worship — were never just about transferring information. They were designed to retrain what you love, week after week, until your wants start lining up with what’s actually good.