“I have a word on my heart for you,” or “the Lord has laid a word on my heart for you,” is a phrase that is common within conservative American Christian circles. Many people who are familiar with this phrase find that it gets under their skin, that it rubs them the wrong way, while those who are unfamiliar with it find it mystifying. What does it mean when Christians say this? Why does it provoke the (typically negative) reactions it does? In this episode, Dan explores this stock phrase within evangelical circles to decode what’s actually going on when Christians speak this way.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
As always, glad to be with all of you, and as always, want to begin by thanking those of you who listen to us, those of you who support us.
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I want to dive into today's topic, and it's one that I think is really sort of interesting.
It's really looking at a particular phrase that people have contacted me about for very different reasons, and it's a phrase I have a lot of experience with as well.
Some of you are familiar with it from backgrounds within conservative Christian circles.
It's a phrase, and what I hear from you is that it's a phrase that kind of gets under your skin and bothers you, or certainly is just sort of notable to you.
You often can't quite put your finger on why.
It's one of these things that what I'll hear from people is I'll say, man, it really bothers me when somebody says this, or I find it just sort of gets the proverbial hackles up when they say this.
I don't understand exactly what that is.
And I think I was in the same boat with that for a long time.
But I've also heard from people who didn't grow up in these contexts who've picked up on this as a particular turn of phrase that's a little bit baffling for them, right?
And we run into this a lot in this series.
It's something we address.
It's something that I hear about a lot.
Part of what I think I hope to do, part of what I think we hope to do on the podcast is to translate elements of American religion and culture in this series, the codes in which that That cultural form sort of takes shape to try to translate that to the unfamiliar.
And this is one of those phrases that can be really baffling for people.
It also, I think, is something of a regional thing.
I've heard from people who grew up within conservative American Christianity, for example, but in a region where this language wasn't common, and they've commented on it.
I've heard it from people certainly who didn't grow up within conservative Christian circles, who have had somebody say this to them, and they just like are sort of like, what the hell is that?
Like, what does that even mean?
It's such a weird way of talking, right?
So what is it that I have in view here?
What I'm thinking of is when somebody prefaces something sort of substantive by saying that they have, quote, a word from their heart that they want to share, or a word on their heart, or they may make the religious intonation a little more explicit and say that the Lord has placed a word on their heart about something.
And it's this notion of having a word on the heart that is what I want to look at today.
And this is the language That rubs some people the wrong way, as I say, and sort of mystifies others.
Because most of us, if we're not in a religious context, do not walk around talking about having a word from the heart that God has placed on us that we ought to share and so forth.
Okay?
So let's start with a little bit of context for this, uh, kind of familiarizing ourselves.
If, if maybe this is a phrase you're unfamiliar with or you've run into it and you just kind of don't get it, right.
It doesn't make sense to you.
As I said before, I think the first thing is that I, I think that this is a regional way of speaking.
I think that I could be wrong.
I'm happy to hear from folks, you know, if, if you grew up, uh, in, I don't know, the Midwest or out in the West or the Pacific Northwest, where I was once upon a time.
And you grew up hearing this.
I'd love to hear that.
I'd love to know that.
But I think it's more common in the American South.
And I think, like parts of other evangelical American Christian culture, it has migrated to other places.
So you will encounter it in other places, but I think it's more prevalent in the American South.
My guess is that that's where it originated.
And insofar as it shows up in other contexts, it's because of those kind of connections.
Often, for example, from pastors who went to seminary in the South or something like that and then moved somewhere else, started churches, took over churches, and so forth.
So, if you grew up in a conservative Christian context, but maybe in Southern California or the Mountain West like I did, you might not have encountered this language as much, right?
But I would say it's probably also not completely unfamiliar to you.
There's a chance that you've run into it some.
Again, I'm interested in hearing if I'm wrong in that.
But that's the first piece of it, is that it's kind of a regionalism.
Right?
So, a lot of the people I've heard from about this phrase are people familiar with conservative Christianity.
Maybe they grew up in it.
Maybe they've been a part of it, and they have heard this phrase, and they understand it.
But I've also known people who grew up in these contexts and haven't heard it, and I think that's the reason why.
Okay?
The second thing that I think is really important to understand in the context and background of this is the theology of this statement.
That it is a kind of masked or implicit theological statement.
It's a statement that presupposes a lot that it leaves unsaid.
I think that that unsaid dimension is really, really key.
So when someone says they have a word on their heart, or a word from their heart, or that a word has been placed on their heart, they are claiming that it is more than just their personal opinion or feeling.
And the idea of that word, quote-unquote, being placed there is the key idea.
They are claiming that God has placed a word or a message on their heart.
And that language of word, placed a word on my heart, word there is shorthand for a kind of message.
I think that's another topic we should get into, maybe in the next episode, maybe sometime in the near future, that notion.
But they're claiming that God has given them this so-called word, a message on their heart.
It's pressing on them And the idea is that they believe, and they'll often speak with greater assurance than this, it won't be that they believe, it's just that there's a word on their heart.
God has placed a word on their heart.
But what they mean is that they believe that God has communicated something to them And impressed upon them the need to share it with you or whomever they're directed to share it with.
So the idea typically is really, this is a divine message for you, the recipient, that God has given me to share with you.
So what somebody is really claiming when they talk about having a word on their heart or having a word from their heart that they need to share is that they actually have a message from God that they have been directed to share with others.
This is sometimes really explicit.
When somebody says, the Lord has placed a word on my heart, I think that's rendered explicit.
It's also why sometimes you'll hear this phrase in the context of pastors giving sermons.
A pastor will stand up in front of the congregation and will say something like, you know, this week the Lord really, really placed a word on my heart that I want to share, or today's sermon is really a word that God has placed on my heart, and so forth.
That's when it's sort of most explicit.
But it's not limited to this.
And that's the key.
Most people, When I hear from them and they talk about this phrase, or most of my recollections of this phrase being used, my experiences with it, are not the recollection of a pastor standing in front of the congregation saying that they have a word on their heart that they've been called to share.
It is usually And I think this is actually the more common usage for a fellow church member or a family member or a friend or an acquaintance to tell somebody individually that they have a word on their heart that they need to share with them.
Right?
They'll pull you aside and say, Hey, do you have a minute?
You know, I've just, I've got a word, I've got a word on my heart that I got to share.
Or God has really been speaking to me about, about you.
And I have a word, has placed a word on my heart that I need to share with you and so forth.
And so the word is often not something general about the faith.
It's often not a message intended to communicate to the whole congregation.
It is something very specific intended for that individual in particular, right?
And so the sense that this is a divine communication is what sets it apart from more mundane or secular examples that we might be familiar with that are sort of similar.
If somebody says that they want to just, you know, speak from the heart or something like that, They're probably talking about something really important or significant to them.
They might be sharing a deeply held view or opinion, but there's no claim to divine origin within it.
No matter how firm they may be in their opinion, they probably know it's their opinion.
This language of having a word on the heart is a claim that this is a divine message that was given to the person for someone else.
So if we get into the idea of, you know, decoding this language, this language of having a word on the heart or having a word laid upon the heart, understanding the background of this phrase gets us part of the way to understanding the code that's at work there, and that is that it's coded language for having a divine message.
And I don't think that that's intended to be secretive.
It's not a hidden thing.
Nobody's like, you know, secretly claiming to have a divine message.
It's just that this language of the Word and the heart and so forth is just part of the language and the parlance and the rhetoric within this kind of Christianity.
And so I think to those in the know, so to speak, we understand that God is involved in this, but especially if you're not familiar with it, Or if you grew up in a context that didn't talk this way, it can sound really strange.
But I'm convinced that this is part of what strikes so many people about this way of speaking, but that they can't quite identify.
The people who say, this really strikes me, or this seems weird, or this really bothers me, or whatever.
I can't quite figure out why.
I don't know what it is when somebody prefaces something by saying, I have a word on my heart that just sort of gets my defenses up or makes me wonder what's coming or whatever.
I think that that's a big part of it.
It is the claim.
And for many, I think the pretension to be speaking for God.
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It's one thing for the speaker to say, you know, God gave me this message.
But for many of us, when somebody makes that claim that what they're going to say to us is a message from God, that seems pretentious.
That might seem just sort of implausible.
It might seem a lot of different things.
It's an implicit claim to authority.
When somebody says, Hey, you know, can I talk to you for a minute?
I got to, I got to share a word on my heart.
They're making a claim to authority.
That implicit claim that it's a divine communication means that really it can't be questioned.
You're not even supposed to say no.
It's bad form to say no.
I'm not really in a place to hear that right now.
Why?
Because it's a message from God.
You don't say no to a message from God.
So it's an implicit claim to authority.
It's a claim that can't be questioned.
It's also a claim that, you know, when the person shares it, they are making the claim that what they're communicating has the weight of divine intention or perspective.
It's not just their opinion.
It's not their perspective.
Again, it's beyond question.
That's a bold claim.
And I think for many of us, it's a claim we're not going to be comfortable with for a lot of reasons.
And I think that's one of the reasons that this way of speaking really gets under people's skin, is just this implicit notion that this is a divine communication.
This is something that God has told me to tell you.
So the first thing to note in decoding the phrase is that it's coded language to be speaking for God.
And again, that can be more explicit when somebody says that the Lord has laid it on their heart or when a pastor stands up in front of the congregation to give a sermon and so forth.
So that's one piece, right, that I think strikes people about this, is this implicit claim to authority, this claim to be speaking for God.
But I think there's a second element to this code that explains why people have so many negative associations with it.
At least the people I hear from, again my own experience with this, I have very negative associations.
This is a phrase that gets under my skin, that gets my hackles up, that really just frankly pisses me off before the person's gone any further.
And that's that, rhetorically, when this phrase is used, whatever comes after it—somebody opens up with the preamble, hey, you know, the Lord has placed a word on my heart that I need to share with you—whatever is going to come after that is almost always negative.
Now again, I'm happy to hear from folks.
If somebody's listening to this and you say, well, actually I grew up in the church and I heard that and it was always really affirming and positive, whatever would be told to me, great.
Want to hear it.
And I know that that will be true for some people.
Nothing is ever true of everybody all the time.
Okay.
But in my experience of it, I didn't really use this phrase, but in most of the uses that I've seen, the people that I've heard from, this is the other piece.
It's almost always a way of prefacing something negative that's going to be said, especially when you're talking to an individual, when that friend or that family member or that authority figure or whomever pulls you aside and says, hey, you got a minute?
I've got a word that I've got to share with you, a word on my heart.
Whatever they say next is going to be something negative.
And the stereotypical way this works is to preface some negative evaluation of your behavior with this, to say, you know, God has placed a word on my heart about you, or the Lord has placed a word on my heart that I need to share.
And then they're going to make some statement about what they perceive as sin in your life, or they're going to make a negative moral evaluation of something about you or your behavior.
Or whatever it is.
It's stereotypically taking somebody aside, more or less discreetly, to then inform them of whatever shortcoming they have.
Example that still sticks with me in my own experience.
When I was in college, I went to a conservative Christian college.
I was a little, you know, what we might refer to as like a preacher boy.
And so sometimes on weekends, I would be invited to speak at different churches around Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is where I went.
And the college I was at even had these programs where like, you know, on particular Sundays, churches could invite and it'd be like a team of students.
There'd be somebody, typically a woman who would go and like lead the music on a Sunday morning and somebody like me who would go and preach the sermon and so forth.
And I remember this one church out in rural Oklahoma.
Long time ago, this is the days before cell phones and GPS and things like that.
And so this church was hard to find, and I got lost.
And I made it into the church like, God, 10, 15 minutes before the sermon was supposed to start.
The person who was there who was going to sing the song, somebody that I knew but didn't know super well, she was already waiting, was clearly nervous, wondering where I was.
And so I I come up and we're just sort of whispering quickly back and forth a little bit about the service.
And she's like, I'm so glad to see you.
And I'm like, oh my gosh, I thought I wasn't going to make it.
You know, that kind of thing.
Do the service.
The music's great.
The congregation is clearly into the sermon that I preach.
Whatever.
That's fine.
And after the service, a woman that I don't know at all.
I don't know this church.
I don't know these people.
I'm there doing this, this kind of guest sermon or whatever.
She approaches the two of us.
She says, Can I just share a word from the heart with the two of you?" We said, yes, certainly, of course.
And she then went in to just lay into us about how rude we were when we came in, and we shouldn't have been whispering, and it was disruptive, and it detracted from worship, and there were people there that might have been saved that day if we hadn't been so distracting, and the whole thing, right?
The point is, that's the mechanism that I found, in my experience, and I hear from others, that this typically worked in, was to, like, preface it, but then say something really, really negative, and often, like in this case, just sort of nasty and unnecessary, but you couldn't push back on it because, you know, hey, it's a word from the Lord.
The Lord has placed the word in my heart to tell you two college students that you're a little bit too much like college students when you came into the church today, right?
For those who aren't familiar with this, you will be familiar with the kind of secular analog of this.
It's the person who says, when they preface something with, you know, I'm saying this as a friend, dot, dot, dot.
Like whatever they're going to say after that is probably not something you want to hear.
Or, I'm saying this because I care about you, dot, dot, dot.
Again, whatever they say is something you're probably not going to want to hear.
So even if you're not familiar with this phrase, you understand what that means.
But this is different because, again, you have this element that it is God's opinion or evaluation.
It is beyond question.
Somebody may be your friend, they may be your family member, they may offer whatever advice or insights they want to offer, but at the end of the day, we know that we can take those or leave them.
As painful as that might be, as wrapped up as we are in those relationships, we know that they're just another person with a perspective.
When somebody claims divine authority, it's different.
And I think this is why this phrase is so infuriating and can be so damaging to so many.
I mean, that little example that I just shared is trivial in most ways.
And yet here I am, a quarter century later, more, and I still remember it vividly because it was hurtful.
It wasn't a big significant event in my life.
I wasn't deeply traumatized by it.
I've had more significant things in my life that have happened.
But you get the idea, right?
Now, when people are told this, and it's things about their sexual practices, or their race, or their ethnicity, or their gender identity, or how they dress, or how they comport themselves, It can be incredibly, incredibly hurtful.
And I think that's the biggest reason why, for so many, it raises the responses that it does.
They have been hurt by it.
And even if it's not a lasting, deep hurt, it's a phrase that when they encounter it, they know that something critical is going to come up afterward, and they know that the discussion is closed because the person has already claimed divine authority for what they say.
So let's wrap all this up.
Where do we go with this?
Well, like a lot of the examples we consider, the phrase often comes from sincerely well-meaning Christians, Christians who really do believe that God is in sort of leading them to tell somebody something.
And for many Christians, it is received or experienced in that spirit.
For them, it communicates concern, both God's concern and the concern of the person speaking to them.
Okay?
Fine.
But the typical dynamics of this phrase are such that it is often not experienced in those ways.
The appeal to divine authority makes it a prime candidate for coercion or judgment or just general spiritual abuse of others to make others do or think or behave the way you think that they should.
By claiming divine authority.
And just as those who care about us or who are our friends can also offer advice and insights that are not given in good faith, right?
The person who says, hey, you know what, I'm saying this because I'm your friend, or I'm saying this because I care about you, when in fact they're saying it because they're jealous, or they're resentful, or maybe they don't care about you, or whatever.
This is open to the same abuse.
Except, again, it's higher and worse and more exacerbated because it claims divine authority behind it, which means it can't be contested.
We are not free to push back or to question it the way we are when that friend or that family member who supposedly cares about us prefaces what they say in this way.
We need to wrap this up.
I want to say again, thank you for listening.
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Again, I can be reached at Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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And as always, I will say that until we meet again in this strange virtual format, please be well.
