Amen, the title of my sermon this morning is, The Reins and the Heart.
The Reins and the Heart.
The Bible says in verse 23, And I will kill her children with death, and all the churches
shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and the hearts, and I will give unto
every one of you according to your works.
Now what does this word mean?
The reins.
R-E-I-N-S.
It's used 15 times in the King James Bible.
But what does it mean?
Well it actually means the kidneys.
The reins are the kidneys.
Now if you look this up in the dictionary, a lot of people will say, oh man, the King
James Bible just uses all this archaic language.
How can we figure out what it means?
Look typically if there's a word in the Bible that you don't understand, you can look it
up in the dictionary and almost every time it's going to give you the right answer.
The vast majority of the time.
And the dictionary that I like to use is I just use dictionary.com.
That's typically what I use.
I have the app on my phone or I just type into the browser dictionary.com.
So I went to dictionary.com and I already knew what it meant but I wanted to demonstrate
this.
So I typed in reins and literally the first thing that popped up, definition number one,
the kidneys.
Okay, so it's not that this is just impossible to understand or too archaic.
It's just sometimes you have to look things up in the dictionary because they're not words
that we commonly use anymore.
Definition number one that came up when I typed reins into dictionary.com is the kidneys.
Definition number two, the region of the kidneys or the lower part of the back.
Definition number three says, especially in biblical use, the seat of the feelings or
affections formerly identified with the kidneys.
Okay, so what is going on here?
Now usually when you hear the word reins, you probably immediately think of a horse
and you think of like the reins like ha.
But that's a completely different word.
Now this word reins means kidneys and there's also a remnant of this in a lot of medical
terms because you'll hear about people having renal failure.
And what is renal failure?
Renal failure is when their kidneys fail.
Now why does the Bible talk about the Lord searching the reins and the hearts?
If the reins are the kidneys or the lower back where the kidneys are located, why does
it say that God searches the reins and the hearts?
Well here's the thing about that.
When you think about something, obviously your brain is the one doing the thinking,
right?
When we think about the body parts associated with different things, cognition takes place
in the brain.
Our mind is where we think thoughts.
But stop and think about this, when you have some kind of an emotional response to something,
do you feel that in your head or do you feel it in your abdomen?
Stop and think about it.
So let's say you get really scared or let's say you're in love or let's say you're really
nervous about something or anxious or let's say you get really angry or you're depressed,
I mean you fill in the emotion.
When you have emotions, they cause a physical response in your abdomen, okay?
And I mean this in the most literal sense.
I'm talking about the actual physical pain or twinge or feeling that you have.
Anybody who's experienced any emotions at all has felt those kind of feelings in their
abdomen and so that's why in the Bible it'll use language regarding the bowels and that
has to do with like love and affection and feelings and emotion and the reins are the
same way.
It's basically just talking about a seat of emotion and that's even what dictionary.com
said under definition three, especially in biblical use, the seat of the feelings or
affections formerly identified with the kidneys.
Now they're trying to make it sound like, oh, this is just some kind of an archaic understanding.
You know, that's what they used to think or something like that.
But it really isn't a formerly or archaic because we still feel things in those parts
of our body and what you have to understand is that it's not that they lacked understanding
of science and that's, you know, now that we've learned science, we know that it's inaccurate.
That's not what's going on.
What's actually going on is that the Bible is just using this symbolically, okay?
Like for example, when the Bible talks about your heart, it's not talking about the blood
pumping organ and you know, no one ever thought that the blood pumping organ is really the
core of your spiritual being.
Okay.
I'm sure somebody thought that, but I'm saying most people didn't think that.
The bottom line is that the reason why the heart is used in that way is because heart
is simply referring to the core, the center of something.
So the center of our being is called our heart and our physical heart is the center of our
body and also all of the blood in our whole body goes through our heart.
It's kind of a clearinghouse for all the blood in our whole body goes through the heart.
And so think about the metaphor when the Bible says, keep thy heart with all diligence for
out of it are the issues of life and the blood is the life.
So these things are just symbolic.
It's not that somebody actually thinks that, you know, emotions happen in your kidneys
or that love happens in your large intestine or that, you know, your soul is physically
located in the blood pumping organ.
But these are good descriptions to help us understand concepts that are not physical.
Your soul is not physical.
The spirit is not physical.
Love is not physical.
Emotions are not physical.
They're in another realm, but there are certain parts of the body that get associated with
these things.
The heart is associated with our central being of who we are on the inside because it's the
central organ in the body and the kidneys or the bowels are associated with emotions
and feelings because that's where you physically feel something.
When you experience emotion, you physically have a gut feeling about these things.