for everything you do flows from it.” (Prov. 4:23)
There’s no beating about the bush, no hedging your bets or sitting on the fence: Above everything else, you need to - you must - guard your heart. Put an unassailable fence around the centre of your soul, a fortress around your heart.
Living carelessly is all too easy to do. To give little serious thought to how we think and feel, to how we react and respond to others, to the impact that circumstances and culture are making upon us, to the toll that is being taken on our sensibilities.
Proverbs urges us to guard against that, to solemnly listen to its implicit warning. The outcome could not be more significant: “everything you do flows from it.” Our hearts, the deepest recesses of our being, have the most directive, shaping impact upon our lives.
Living a godly life is not a matter of emotional intuition; it needs thought and reflection and a humble determination to search our heart and seek the help of God. Guarding your heart is not slight working, it is intensely demanding.
And, often, it feels like we’re working in the dark - it has recesses we are barely aware of. It has been shaped in sin by all manner of life experiences and traumas and habits of thinking and behaving that possess captive power. Shaped by a past that, as William Faulkner said, "is never dead, it isn’t even past.” It keeps intruding on the present and insists on shaping the future.
These are the hearts that are deluged by the cares of life, by the weight of insecurity and anxiety, pummelled by the tides of trial and temptation. How can we hope to guard a place of such significance when it is assaulted by forces we cannot see and have no answer to? When we feel the force of Jeremiah 17:9, that our hearts are deceitful and unknowable in their truest dimensions?
The psalms express the experience of so many when they speak of our hearts being overwhelmed by torrents of destruction (18:4), by our guilt (38:4), by horror (55:5), by sins (65:3) and troubles (88:3). Such admissions make Proverbs 4:23 seem a world away.
But from that place of recognised vulnerability, a prayer ascends to the God of all grace:
“I call as my heart grows faint;
lead me to the rock that is higher than I” (Ps. 61:2)
Our hearts need to be guarded; the stakes are too high not to do so. But that shielding has to begin at the point we feel ourselves most vulnerable and from which we look to the one who alone can keep us, re-shape our hearts and begin to transform us by the renewing of our minds.
The one who is able to garrison our hearts through faith, whose mercies are the motive power for offering ourselves to him as living sacrifices.
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Sweet the moments, rich in blessing,
Which before the cross I spend,
Life and health, and peace possessing
From the sinner's dying Friend!
Here I rest, in wonder viewing
All my sins on Jesus laid,
And a full redemption flowing
From the sacrifice He made.
Here I find the hope of heaven,
While upon the Lamb I gaze;
Loving much, and much forgiven,
Let my heart o'erflow in praise.
Love and grief my heart dividing,
With my tears His feet I'll bathe,
Constant still in faith abiding,
Life deriving from His death.
Lord, in ceaseless contemplation
Fix my thankful heart on Thee!
Till I taste Thy full salvation,
And Thine unveiled glory see.
(William Walter Shirley, 1725-86)
