Praying God's Wisdom: Guard Your Heart

used with permission from Sara's Art Life

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Proverbs 4:23

 Do you think much about your heart? You do if it aches, if someone breaks it, or if it is full. Both of my grandfathers suffered heart attacks and had heart surgeries, my paternal grandfather had several. Now, I know that the author was referring to our spiritual hearts in this passage, but I think there are correlations and I’d love to explore them with you here today.

 Most of us don’t think about our physical hearts very often unless something goes wrong. When was the last time you thought about the heart beating constantly in your chest? When was the last time you told it to beat? And yet it continues, faithfully, minute after minute, hour after hour. But once something goes wrong, it jumps to the front of our minds. After you’ve had a heart attack and/or surgery, it’s hard not to think of it. In those times, we are really careful about guarding our physical hearts. I remember after my grandfathers’ surgeries visiting them and seeing them hold a pillow carefully over their heart if they needed to cough, or sneeze, or even laugh. It’s this image of holding a pillow over our heart that sticks in my mind this morning as I consider guarding our spiritual hearts. I actually have a picture of one of my grandfathers with his heart pillow, it even has a heart shape stitched on it, but I’m not sure he would appreciate me sharing it here so I asked my AI friends to each try recreating it as a portrait and the one below was my favorite. I love that, in our physical lives, we use a pillow, something soft to guard our hearts. In the same way, I don't think that God wants us to build walls of stone and barricades around our hearts. Instead, we need to guard our spiritual hearts with something soft as well.

Portrait of my Grandpa, created from an image using ChatGpt

 Many, if not most, of the things we do affect our hearts. What we eat, how or if we exercise, what our rest looks like, etc. It all contributes to our heart, or cardiac, health. Very much like this, everything we do, what we watch, who we talk to, what we talk about, what we think about, all of it goes towards our spiritual cardiac health. Like with our physical health, there are things we need to avoid (like smoking or certain foods) and things that we need to nurture (like exercise and rest). With our spiritual hearts, the Bible is quite clear on what we need to avoid. David Gusik quotes Wiersbe in his commentary and says, “The Bible warns us to avoid a double heart (Psalm 12:2), a hard heart (Proverbs 28:14), a proud heart (Proverbs 21:4), an unbelieving heart (Hebrews 3:12), a cold heart (Matthew 24:12), and an unclean heart (Psalm 51:10).” If these are the things we should avoid, what should we nurture? I think Jesus said it best in Matthew 6:33, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” When I was growing up, I used to struggle with riding in a car that my aunt drove. She had this particular habit of both turning the wheel toward whatever she was looking at, and wanting to see what was out the window on either side of the car. This mean the car tended to veer from side to side as we traveled down the road. Once that landed me on the side of the road with my mother waiting for someone else to come pick us up and bring me home because I just couldn’t take it. I think our hearts are the same way. We get distracted and drawn towards things alongside the path God has us on. We see something shiny, something exciting, and without thinking about it or intending to, we move ever so slightly toward it, veering off the path that God has us on. How do we stay firmly on the path? Fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). By staying in regular communication with Jesus, by being in His Word, by surrounding ourselves with people who point us to Him, we keep our eyes on the end goal – bringing glory and honor to God. Jesus did the same thing as that verse continues. He, “for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” He kept His eyes on the end goal, and that helped Him to stay strong and endure unimaginable pain and the devastating heartache of bearing the weight of all our sin and being separated from the Father. It also landed Him exactly where He was supposed to, at the right hand of the throne of God.

used with permission from Sara's Art Life

 Our physical heart determines our life or death. Our spiritual heart determines the same, but on a much bigger scale. When someone is trying to determine whether we are still alive, they check our pulse. They actually check it for a lot of things besides that too, it tells them the health of our heart as well. What does your spiritual pulse say about you? How is your spiritual cardiac health? Do you struggle with cold or unbelieving heart syndrome? Is your heart soft and open to God’s Holy Spirit? If someone were to check your spiritual pulse, what would they learn?

 I wrote last year about words falling out of my mouth. The thing is, they couldn’t fall out if they weren’t already in there! Again, my friend David quoted his friend, Wiersbe and shared, “If we pollute that wellspring, the infection will spread; before long, hidden appetites will become open sins and public shame.” If I want bad things to stop coming out of my mouth unbidden, then I ought to be careful not to allow them in my heart in the first place. If I am meditating on God’s Word, on good things, on ways to love and bless others, then when thoughts become words by accident, they will be good ones. I remember when we were rolling through the resort in Disney World, I was very tired and my filter was completely gone. My thoughts were all verbal, nothing was staying in my head. I saw a lady walking by and I said, “Oh, she looks very nice in that dress.” I was embarrassed because I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. I avoid commenting on strangers aloud, whether positively or negatively, in general. But, I thought in hindsight, at least the thought that had fallen out was a good one! Sadly, I’ve had more than a few embarrassing moments where less than agreeable thoughts fell out. My family has gotten a fair amount of entertainment from them, but boy it makes me feel bad when I do it!

Here’s the Thing: The solution to my problem seems to be curating an environment of love, kindness, and goodness in my heart so that when things come out unintentionally, at least they are good things. That all rolls back to the fruit of the spirit and grounding myself in Him (Galatians 5:22-23)!