Let’s re-centre our hearts – our attitudes, our whole personality, our very selves

Christopher Seaman, 31 July 2022

Ecclesiastes 1: 2, 12–14; 2: 18–23; Colossians 3: 1–11; Luke 12: 13–21

Have you had your heart checked lately? Well, I can tell you, yes you have – we all have, because our three readings today are all about people’s hearts being in the right place.

The word ‘heart’ in the Bible means more than just our feelings. It includes our will, our attitudes, our whole personality, our very selves, including the part of us that makes decisions.

Today’s first reading, from Ecclesiastes, seems very negative: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ Emptiness. Questioning the very purpose of life. The writer goes on: ‘I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun – this also is vanity’. Oh dear, oh dear, how did such negative stuff ever get into the Bible? There must be a key to Ecclesiastes. What can it be?

Well, I found a possible key in a surprising place. Our churches have a motto, a strapline: ‘Pilgrims on a journey’. Not ‘Pilgrims at their destination’. All journeys do have a destination, but if we think of the journey as the destination, we’ll be disappointed. St Paul, writing to the Corinthians, put it perfectly: ‘If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people the most miserable’.

The world is a source of God’s goodness, love and mercy … until we treat it as an end in itself, something to cling on to desperately, at all costs, the ‘be-all and end-all’. That would be turning the journey into the destination, which it isn’t. And this could be the key to Ecclesiastes – the writer is trying to get rid of any false hopes we may have of all our needs being met in this life. He’s trying to re-centre our hearts, to long for a true hope, which (unknown to him) will be the resurrection of Jesus. For us pilgrims, resurrection is our destination. This life is our journey.


The world is a source of God’s goodness, love and mercy … until we treat it as an end in itself, something to cling on to desperately.


C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the most logical explanation is that I was made for another world’. Even the writer of Ecclesiastes gives us a hint of this later on in the book: ‘God has put eternity in the human heart’. If you like, we’ve been created with a God-shaped gap within us that nothing and nobody else can fill – although we all try stuffing other things and people into it all the time, and end up disappointed.

In our second reading, St Paul encourages the Colossians to ‘set their affection on things above, not on things on the earth’ (KJV). And in our gospel reading, the same thing crops up: the rich man building bigger barns, and investing his affections in this world only. God says to him, ‘You fool!’

In our second reading, St Paul encourages the Colossians to ‘set their affection on things above, not on things on the earth’ (KJV). And in our gospel reading, the same thing crops up: the rich man building bigger barns, and investing his affections in this world only. God says to him, ‘You fool!’

I don’t know about you, but if I question whether my own heart is in the right place, I can easily get on a guilt-trip and think I’m failing as a Christian. We can all feel as if we’re being asked to pull ourselves up by our boot-straps and become saints.

But the good news is that God always takes the initiative in everything, including re-centring our hearts. I love God’s promise in the book of Ezekiel, ‘A new heart will I give you’. St John in his first letter writes, ‘We love God because he loved us first’. And Jesus says, ‘I stand at the door and knock’, in the book of Revelation.

If we respond to God’s initiative and allow him to lovingly re-centre our hearts, so that ‘our affections are on things above’ – our destination not our journey – what sort of people will we pilgrims be like as we travel? Will we be less alive, will we be anaesthetised to joy, sorrow, fear and suffering? Will we be insensitive to other people, unable to get alongside them? Will we be like cold stone carvings of saints, so heavenly minded that we are no earthly use?

That can’t be so. Jesus said that he came so that we might have life in all its fulness, that we might be more alive. So is this a contradiction – our affections set on the destination, but more fully alive on the journey here and now? It could be, except for one thing: the resurrection of Jesus, which gives us confidence to set our affections on our destination. When we do that, often to our surprise it becomes safe to dare to enter more fully into this journey with its joys and sorrows, its suffering and its disappointments, knowing that it doesn’t have the last word, it’s not our destination. Indeed, we may even appreciate life’s blessings more and have a stronger sense of gratitude as we loosen our grip on the here and now.

Many people know John Bunyan’s great hymn ‘To be a pilgrim’. Bunyan writes that in the end nothing can daunt our spirit, because ‘we know we at the end shall life inherit’. And that is the pilgrim’s destination.

Let us pray: We thank you, dear Lord, that our journey here is not an aimless wandering, but a pilgrimage with a glorious destination. We ask, Father, that you will centre our hearts on our destination, and also set us free to be more fully alive as we journey. We ask this for the sake of him who is indeed the Resurrection and the Life, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.