How often are we talking to the man (or woman) in the mirror? Christian hip-hop artists FLAME and Shai Linne brilliantly came together in a project entitled “To My Heart,” which remind us of the condition we are in daily.
Every day is a battle between flesh and spirit and we need to pay more attention and put more effort in who is winning every day. One of the first lyrical lines in “To My Heart” is “I thought you were innocent until I read the 5th verse in the 6th chapter of Genesis.” What did God say in this verse?
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” – Genesis 6:5
These two rappers could have stopped right then and there and made it an interlude and it would have been equally as awesome of a song. Any art project that makes the listener run to the Word is truly a piece that glorifies the Most High God. That line within itself causes the listener to self-reflect. Have we looked in the mirror and rebuked our own heart?
In “To My Heart” the rapping evangelists share in a self-reflective moment: “Because I’m tired of your suggestions/I’m tired of all your reflections/I’m tired of you sayin’ sex is the best way to ease pain.”
What a great moment of revelation! The devil will leave subtle hints in our hearts and tempt us to sin as often as he possibly can. Sometimes when we attempt to live off God’s grace we forget what God told us in reference to Him and the way we should live. Let’s take a brief moment to reflect on direct statements from Jesus…
“If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever.” – John 14:15
“And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” – Luke 6:46
Shai Linne is clever in sharing “I’m called a heart but see I’m not a bodily artery/pardon me but honestly you were improperly guarding me/ cause whether it’s the TV or CD/or DVD easily I’d speedily greedily eat what you feedin’ me”
In this lyrical depiction of our “heart” (which when studying Hebrew we find is a synonym for “mind”), we realize we are attracted to things contrary to the Word of God, not just because of our natural sin nature, but because we are not putting more effort in guarding what gets into our mind! When was the last time we looked into ourselves in a state of repentance and asked God to show us what shows on television we need to cut off, what DVD or Blu-ray films we need to throw out, what books we need to straight up burn, and what CDs we need to break and forget?
Many individuals cannot wait to exclaim that God knows their heart, but that’s exactly it: God is a discerner of the heart, and if it is NOT right then there is NO reservation in Heaven. What does the Bible say about what God wants us to do if we claim we believe He is our true and living God?
According to Romans 6 verse 16, Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? This scripture is the direct parallel to Shai Linne’s lyric highlighting that either we are choosing our god to be our flesh or we are choosing God to recheck and reshape our heart to keep it devoted to Him. (See also Matthew 7:21, Joshua 1:8, James 1:22, 1 Samuel 15:22, Ephesians 6:5-9, Isaiah 1:19, James 2:24, Hebrews 12:5-6)
We do not want to have of ourselves, as the rappers share in this song, an “inaccurate depiction not based on Holy inscription” because the enemy duped us. “To My Heart” rightly shares “my greatest enemy pretends to be friends….but it’s the inner me that needs to be cleansed.”
So let us clean ourselves by looking in the mirror and spending some honest time talking to God.
For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. – 1 Corinthians 11:31
