What Does the Bible Mean by a Broken Heart?

Why “My Heart Is Broken” Deserves a Closer Look

“My heart is broken.” It’s one of the most popular phrases in our language. We hear it after loss or disappointment. In conversations, books, songs, and prayers. Most of the time, nobody asks what those words actually mean because everyone assumes they already know.

I assumed I knew too. Then one day I stopped on a question that had never crossed my mind before. What exactly is broken? The more I thought about it, the less certain I became.

David certainly wasn’t pretending when he wrote,

“Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.” Psalm 69:20 (KJV)

What Does the Bible Mean by the Heart?

What surprised me was something else.

Although Scripture speaks about a broken heart, it never assumes the reader already understands what the heart is. In fact, the more I searched, the more I realized that I had been bringing my own definition to the Scripture instead of asking what God meant when He chose those words.

That simple change completely changed the way I read every passage about the heart.

So before trying to answer what a broken heart is, let’s begin with a simpler question.

What does the Bible mean by the heart?

I expected the answer to be simple. Instead, I discovered that before Scripture ever explains what a broken heart is, it spends hundreds of verses teaching us what the heart is.

That caught me completely off guard.

Because the Bible doesn’t use the word heart the way I do.

What Does the Heart Do According to the Bible?

When I say “heart,” I usually think about emotions.

The more I searched, the more I realized Scripture describes something much broader than that.

The heart believes.

“For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness…” Romans 10:10

The heart trusts. Trusting God When You're Trapped in Uncertainty

“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart…” Proverbs 3:5

The heart thinks.

“For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he…” Proverbs 23:7

The heart imagines.

“Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart…” Genesis 6:5

The heart understands.

“And should understand with their heart…” Matthew 13:15

The heart reasons.

“Why reason ye these things in your hearts?” Mark 2:8

The heart purposes.

“Daniel purposed in his heart…” Daniel 1:8

The heart considers.

“I considered in my heart…” Ecclesiastes 9:1

The heart rejoices.

“Your heart shall rejoice…” John 16:22

The heart fears.

“They that are of a fearful heart…” Isaiah 35:4

And that’s only part of the picture.

Scripture also speaks about a heart that seeks God, remembers, treasures, speaks, becomes hard, becomes clean, becomes whole, becomes divided, becomes contrite, and much more.

At some point I stopped reading those verses individually and started reading them together.

That’s when one observation became impossible to ignore.

The Bible never describes the heart as simply the place where emotions live. It consistently describes the heart as the place where a person believes, trusts, understands, reasons, chooses, remembers and responds.

That changed the question I had been asking from the beginning.

If this is what God means by the heart…

then what does He mean when He says that heart is broken?

So What Does the Bible Mean by a Broken Heart?

Looking back at these passages, I don’t think the Bible describes a broken heart the way I always assumed. It isn’t simply another way of saying that someone is hurting deeply. Scripture never denies the pain. But the Bible describes the heart as the place where a person believes, trusts, understands, reasons, purposes and responds. When sorrow reaches that place, it doesn’t merely leave a painful memory behind. It affects the condition of the inner person.

That doesn’t mean every painful experience produces the same heart condition. Two people can walk through the same loss and leave with two very different hearts.

One becomes bitter.

Another becomes humble.

One stops trusting.

Another learns to trust God more deeply.

The event may be the same. The condition of the heart is not. That’s why I no longer read the phrase “my heart is broken” as though the Bible were describing a heart that shattered like glass. I see it as the condition of a heart that has been deeply affected by sorrow. A heart whose believing, trusting, understanding and responding have all been touched by what it has lived through. And perhaps that’s why Scripture speaks so often about the condition of the heart. Not because God is trying to minimize what happened. But because He sees the place within us that the pain has begun to shape.

So if someone asked me today,

“What does the Bible mean by a broken heart?”

I think my answer would be this:

A broken heart is the condition of the inner person after sorrow has profoundly affected the place where that person believes, trusts, understands and responds.

That doesn’t answer every question. But it answered the one that first led me here. And maybe it will encourage you to open the Scriptures again and ask the same question I did.

Not, “What have I always assumed these words meant?”

But, “What did God mean when He chose them?”