The Heart and the Hand

Tonight, during Family Home Evening, we talked about how the Romans (or somebody; Paul's a little hard to follow sometimes) had the Gospel and were practicing the religion, but it seemed like their hearts weren't really in it. They were going through the motions, but maybe they weren't actually being righteous. (I don't know for certain. I'd have to reread a few chapters before I knew certainly enough to pass judgment. But whatever, it's what I thought of as I listened to those chapters.) Paul's point seemed to be that, even if we do good works, those good works mean nothing unless our hearts are in the right place.

However, the opposite is also true. A person could have a good heart and good intentions, but unless they're also doing good things, that's not all that great. The stories of history and fiction contain dozens of villains with supposedly good intentions. They had good desires, but they committed evil acts, assuming that the ends justified the means. Similarly, in life it's easy to have good goals and desires, and then to not act on them for any number of reasons, and that's not great either.

To be righteous, we need to both have righteous desires and perform righteous actions. We need to both want good with our hearts and do goo with our hands. Just doing good isn't good enough without good motivations, and good motivations aren't good enough unless they're strong enough to lead to actually doing good. Neither the heart nor the hands are sufficient on their own. To fully be righteous, we need both to want to do good and to actually do it.