The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way… The heart knows its own bitterness. Proverbs 14:8,10

Why do I do the things I do? Why do I behave this way? Where do my problems come from?

The wise seek to understand (through reason) their own way. Knowing ourselves helps us identify our weaknesses and, as a result, come up with new strategies to deal with them.

The heart knows its own bitterness – in other words, deep down, we know where our bitterness comes from. If we seek to understand our own way, we will discover the roots of our problems. What makes it hard, unfortunately, is the pain of recognizing these roots. Many times, we don’t want to give in and admit our bad roots. We find it more convenient and easy to simply blame others for our failures, and use circumstances as excuses to justify our problems.

When the Lord Jesus taught that, “A tree is known by its fruit”, within the context of that teaching, He pointed to the root of all bad fruits, which is the human heart (Matthew 12.33-35). Notice:

• The heart is the symbol of emotions; it’s where feelings and emotional debris reside 
• The heart refers to our soul 
• Our spirit is linked to our mind, where God enables us to reason 
• Our soul, on the other hand, is linked to the heart, which cannot think, does not do the intelligent thing, ignores reason and values emotions 

The Bible talks about sins that are known as “deadly”, in other words, the most harmful and dangerous—because they give birth to other sins. Let’s look at some of these sins, or bad roots, as we continue on this subject tomorrow.

I hope you’ll be back here for this very interesting follow-up.