The Lord is love itself, and his love for us never wavers and never changes. What does waver and change is the degree to which we accept and respond to the Lord's love. So the Lord does not curse us; we curse ourselves by turning away from Him. So when the Bible talks of a "curse" or something being "cursed," it is talking about people turning away from the Lord and creating a separation. Among the most famous curses is that pronounced on the serpent after it beguiled Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden. The serpent represents our tendency to rely on our own senses for knowledge instead of the Lord. That tendency caused the people of the Lord's first, most innocent church to turn away from His guidance, cursing themselves.

The heart means love. A good heart means love to the Lord and to the neighbor, while a hard or stony heart means the love of self or the world -- riches and things. When the psalmist asks the Lord to search his heart, he wants the Lord to see what it is that he loves. And we are what we love. What we eat may form our earthly body, but it's only temporary, what we love forms our spiritual body, beautiful or ugly as we have chosen. It's interesting to note that the first multi-cellular motion of our embryo is the pulsating that starts in a twist of blood vessel that is to become our heart, and the last motion of our natural body is our heartbeat. It is there for all of our natural life. And of course there is a beating heart in our spiritual bodies when we come to put them on.