After George Müller got his heart into a place where it had “no will of its own in regard to a given matter,” he remained on guard against feeling as a means of decision-making. When I think on how love drove him to care for thousands of orphans, it seems odd that he would not want feelings to reign. A friend of mine who is a philosophy professor would wholeheartedly approve, despite being an atheist; whenever his students begin a sentence with “I feel,” he nips them in the bud. “Think your way to truth,” he tells them, “don’t feel.”

It’s certainly an odd notion, in an age of irrationality and sentimentality, when you’re supposed to listen to your heart, as a pop song goes, and when learning to love yourself, according to an older pop hit, is the greatest love of all. Aren’t all the movie heroes, after all, people who lead with their hearts?

Yet Müller distrusted his own emotions when it came to decision-making, because he knew what the Bible warned, that the heart is deceitful, and dreadfully sick. When emotions are in charge, such that they govern actions, they are more likely than not to extend first to the self, and to others only insofar as they propel one’s self-love. We’ve all met parents, for example, who tell themselves they doesn’t discipline their children because they love them so very much, but who in actuality love themselves too much, and see their children only as extensions of themselves. The heart can be beautiful, the heart makes us human, but the heart is a lousy decision-maker, because its prime object of affection is so frequently itself.

So Müller, that committed Christian and caregiver to lost children, worked to keep his feelings in check. Only then, he must have believed, could he reflect the love of God, which is always borne out in action, not sentiment. It’s been quite often, in my ten years as a Christian, that I have let my emotions make decisions for me, while I told myself that the whisperings of my deceitful heart were in fact the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Ironically, it’s only as I’ve learned to try, at least, to put my own wants in check that I have found my actions more infused with genuine love, as opposed to sentiment, with self-sacrifice, as opposed to self-centered martyrdom, with courage, as opposed to bravado. It’s one more way that He is strong where we are weak, which is something I learned to pronounce early in my Christian walk, but have only recently begun to understand.

Editor’s Note: Here’s a link to Tony’s first post in this series, “A rule of prayer.”