Actions always flow from the heart. The heart always flows out into actions.
Several previous blog posts have been about the deep realities of your heart - what's hidden on the inside, invisible to everyone, even the people who know you best. Only God knows what's really going on in your heart - often it's even hidden from us ourselves! One of the things that God's Word does for us is to shock us into realizing what's really deep down in our heart and making us confront it.
What is on the inside must manifest in some way on the outside.
The intent that forms in the heart is THEN filtered through each of our unique personalities, our experiences, our spiritual gifts, and our circumstances and become actions, what we say and do. Other people cannot see out hearts, but what other people DO see are our actions, what we say and do.
And these actions are really, really important. What's in your heart ALWAYS come out in your actions.
We can be fooled by looking at these actions because sometimes they look like really good things, but they come from a heart that is out of line with God's heart - from wrong desires and beliefs and intentions. The Pharisees are famous for this kind of thing. Jesus said about them,
"This people honors Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me."
Honoring God with our lips is a good thing, right? But Jesus saw right through them, right down to their dirty hearts and called them out on it. So our goal is to have the right actions flowing out of a right heart. These actions, one after another after another over the course of all your days are what the Bible calls your "walk." The power of God works in our hearts to transform us to be more and more like Jesus, and good works flow naturally out of a heart like Jesus'. Paul said in Ephesians 2:10
"For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."
If you would benefit from an interactive journaling workbook about the heart, I have one for you! You can grab a copy here.