Guard Your Heart

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." 

- Proverbs 4:23

I have a clear picture in my head of being 15 years old in church and seeing a fiery women of God stand up on a stage and yell, "Girls! We have to guard our hearts!" I remembering thinking, "Yeah! That's right, preach it!" I also remember not really having any idea about what she meant though. I didn't know what the practically looked like to guard my heart, do I just put my hands on my chest? No, of course not, I'd look silly. It's not literal in a physical way. It is literal in an emotional and spiritual way. So what does it really mean to "guard our hearts" and how do we do that?

God has given me some revelations on what it means so I am going to share that today. We need to guard our hearts from both people and things. We are in a covenant with God right? In Jeremiah 31:33 God says, "This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." The most common Hebrew word in the Old Testament for "covenant" is 'berith', a word of uncertain derivation. It seems to come from either the Hebrew verb 'to cut' or from the Assyrian word 'to bind'.  A lot of scholars and theologians have thought these words through and have come to their own conclusions. What I think though is that we are in a covenant of bondage to God, which requires some cutting away of ourselves. Or perhaps you could call it, cutting off our selves to give ourselves to God. God calls us to guard our hearts because our hearts are in a covenant with him! We cannot give our heart to something or someone else when we have already "cut it off", so to speak, and bound it to His heart. If you're visual, just think about literally doing that with real hearts. . . That would be so messy and yucky! All the verses about not committing adulatory (Exodus 20:14) or worshiping other idols (Exodus 34:14, Leviticus 26:1) go hand in hand with guarding our hearts. God is asking us to not give our hearts away, create covenant, bind ourselves up or give ourselves away to other things or people. 

To put it more simply and practically all of this means do not give pieces of your heart away to things you love that our unworthy of your heart. Do not love your Spotify account so much that your heart is in it, same with; your makeup, your size jeans, your hair or your smart phone. These things sound so dumb, and you're thinking, "Ha! I would not give my heart to my hair or my smartphone!" But I am telling you now that we live in a society full of idols like these that we are committing adultery with in the most suttel ways. We do not even notice we put our heart in something until it is taken away. I broke my smartphone and had a melt down! I cut my hair short and thought I was ugly for two weeks. I am telling you, these idols are sneaky. That is just what Satan does, is be sneaky. Thank God for everything you have that you love, thank Him for your clothes are for your smartphone. Praise Him for it and remind yourself everything we have is really from God and not ours. That way when it disappears your heart was not attached to it, but attached to God. 

We also need to guard our heart from people sometimes, especially in school. I think Church community is a less guarded place, but I am telling you I wish I would've guarded my heart so much more during school. So many guys and girls I made covenants with without even knowing it and it hurt so much when they left. There are ways to love people without giving them a piece of your heart and you have to ask the Lord to guide you on how to do that. We can not put up walls in fear of everyone. We have to be real with people without letting our emotions get attached and giving ourselves away. God is a lamp to our feet, right? (Psalm 119:105) So we can also ask him to shine a light on the people we come across. He will speak to us who we can let in more than others and he will show you who your brothers and sisters in Christ are. Those brothers and sisters are people we can attach to, lean on and trust in.

Now, just two more things. Luke 6:45 says, "A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of." This means you can tell where your heart is based on what you say. I have friends who aren't Christians who constantly talk about their hair and makeup. I can tell their heart is completely absorbed in vanity because of the way they talk. It's like if a girl only talks about her boyfriend, she has probably given a lot of her heart to him. 

Matthew 6:22 says, "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light." So another way to guard your heart is to guard your eyes. Do not think you can watch whatever you want and be pure on the inside. Be careful what movies you watch, you think "oh it's okay, there is only one sex scene." But, it can still mess with you, trust me, I am a victim of this too and still working on it. It is sneaky how Satan as used such "small" things in our society to try and unbind us from God. He wants to take back that cut of ourselves we gave to God and have it commit adultery, but we must guard our covenant with God. But He will light the way for you if you just ask.