GUARDING YOUR HEART
Proverbs 4:20-27 NKJV
20 My son, give attention to my words;
Incline your ear to my sayings.
21 Do not let them depart from your eyes;
Keep them in the midst of your heart;
22 For they are life to those who find them,
And health to all their flesh.
23 Keep your heart with all diligence,
For out of it spring the issues of life.
24 Put away from you a [a]deceitful mouth,
And put perverse lips far from you.
25 Let your eyes look straight ahead,
And your eyelids look right before you.
26 Ponder the path of your feet,
And let all your ways be established.
27 Do not turn to the right or the left;
Remove your foot from evil.
This passage is longer than our usual devotional verses. But there are some important truths here. I will not be able to cover them all in detail, but you can get the gist of this valuable principle.
When someone says guard your heart, what comes to mind? It can mean never emotionally connecting with others so that you are not left hurting in case things go wrong. Guarding your heart for others would be eating heart-healthy foods and getting cardiovascular exercise. But the scriptures do not refer to either one of those things.
Guarding your heart in the biblical sense is guarding your inner life. Because we are spiritual beings who possess a mind, will, and emotions and live in a physical body, our spirit is the part of us that needs to be protected. Our spirit will impact our mind, will, and emotions, and the Bible also makes a case for our spiritual health impacting our physical bodies.
So here is a quick summary of guarding your heart. We start by giving attention to God's Word. Jesus said His words were spirit and life. God's Word is inspired and will benefit us if we give it the proper place and respect. So, we pay attention to His words and listen to what they are saying. We allow God's Word to impact our thinking and even our imagination. This is not letting His words depart from our eyes. And by focusing our minds on what His Word says, we keep God's Word in our hearts. This is the benefit of taking the time to prayerfully meditate on what the Bible says. The end result is that the words of the Bible impact our spirits in a positive way. God's Word is so powerful it impacts our mind and can administer health to our bodies.
The importance of guarding our heart is that it is the source of our life. Our life flows out of our spirit. Out of our hearts spring the issues of life. Seeing a loved one in a casket, we know that their physical life is gone, but the source of their life, their spirit, has left their body. Peter referred to his body as a tent, a temporary dwelling.
To guard this most important part of us, we must pay attention to three areas: our words, our focus, and our walk. Put away a deceitful mouth. We don't speak what is contrary to what God says. We don't speak just any words. We are not just saying we are quick to hear and slow to speak because we choose our words. Our words are more important than we have realized.
Guard your focus. Looking straight before us means we control what we look at and focus on. Again, we don't have the time to delve into this subject, but what we look at and what we allow to enter our eyes has an effect on our hearts. We can allow good stuff or bad, clean or unclean, but our focus is important.
And last, we must be careful about how we walk or how we live. Our actions can be good or evil, and evil plays hard on the heart. With God's Word to guide us into what is good and what is wrong we have a template of how to live. Anger, lying, and unforgiveness are just a few of the things that can have a negative impact on our hearts.
APPLICATION
I believe this is such a valuable passage. To get the most out of what the Lord is saying to us here, take some time this month to look at these eight verses and think about how to apply them to your life. No win-lose here. This is a total win-win proposition. And this will help your heart in a big way.