Above all things guarded, guard your heart, because everything you do flows from it. Keep your mouth free from perversity; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.
Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly in front of you. Think carefully about the paths of your feet and be firm in all your ways, these are some of the things that are meant for us in Proverbs 4:23.
How does God think we live? The book of Proverbs beautifully takes practical matters, weaves together the spiritual, and makes life as beautiful as God intended it to be.
When a person knows God and has a good relationship, he will find that he lives a perfectly natural, intensely practical, and deeply spiritual life.
What Does Guard Your Heart Mean?
“Above all things guard, guard your heart” What does it mean?
“Above all things guard, guard your heart” means that you must nurture the new nature with the love and the word of God, and you will take care not to contaminate it with trivial or undesirable things that are unpleasant in the eyes of our creator.
In the Old Testament, the word “heart” is used more than 800 times, but more than 200 times it refers to the thought of life, the emotions, the sources of life, and those things that motivate and mold us. The Bible calls that the heart. I call it the life of thought.
Why is thought life so important? Why did Solomon say, ” above all, guard your heart, because all the situations of life depend on it?” Because thought controls the rest of your life.
If you tell me what you think, I will tell you who you are and the life you live. What you think says a lot about who you are. The thought of life controls you. Your thoughts, positive, negative, good or bad, control your attitudes. Your attitudes lead to your actions.
Your thoughts control your actions
All good psychologists will tell you that. Someone once said: “Sow a thought, reap a fact. Sow a fact, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.
Before you can do something, you have to think about it. Your thoughts lead to attitudes; attitudes lead to actions; actions lead to those achievements. Everything begins with the life of thought. Your achievements will be the total sum of each of your thoughts.
This is so fundamental that God destroyed an entire civilization because they were wicked in thought. God said, “The thoughts of your hearts are so evil that I am going to have to destroy them,” and he sent the flood. The problem of the world is the impurity of the heart.
What Solomon wanted to express in that sentence was: “Son, guard, protect and be careful with your mental life. Keep your heart with all diligence.” The Lord Jesus Christ wants us to present our bodies, including our minds, to Him so that He can transform us. It is not strange that the enemy wants to harm the mind.
When God is in the heart, then we think well, we live well, and we do what is right. When God is absent, we think badly, we do badly, and we live badly. Be careful what comes to mind. Your thoughts have to be pure. Solomon warns about having impure and immoral thoughts in the heart and life.
Let me tell you something wonderful. God made you where you can’t think two things at once. So how do you avoid thinking about what is wrong? Just think about what is good. And if you’re thinking about what’s right, you can’t be thinking about what’s wrong.
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Reasons to protect your heart
The fragility of our hearts should not be taken lightly. If your heart is the connection with God, what kind of relationship will you have if it begins to fail? If we allow all the unpleasant forces in the world to draw us away from God, our hearts become unhealthy.
If we only feed the garbage of our hearts, it stops working as it should. Just like our physical health, our spiritual health can fail if we don’t take good care of it. When we let our guard down and forget the things that God tells us through the Bible and prayer, we damage our hearts. Guarding our hearts is necessary for at least three reasons:
1. Because your heart is extremely valuable.
We do not keep worthless things; you take the garbage to the street, it is placed without protection and it is collected the next day. Why? Because it has no value. It is not the same with your heart, your heart is your authentic being, the core of your being. It is where all your dreams, desires, and passions live. It is that part of you that connects with God and other people.
As with your physical body, if your spiritual heart dies, your leadership dies. For this reason, Solomon says: “Above all things guard, guard your heart.” He doesn’t say, “If you make it” or “It would be nice if.” No, he says, make it your top priority.
2. Because your heart is the source of everything you do.
King Solomon says that it is the “fountain of life”. In other words, it is the source of everything else in your life. Your heart overflows in thoughts, words, and actions.
If your heart is not healthy, it has an impact on everything else. It threatens your relationship with your family, friends, ministry, career, and indeed legacy. Therefore, it is imperative that it be saved.
3. Because your heart is under constant attack
When Solomon says “above all things guard, guard your heart, he also implies that it is a combat zone, in which there may be many casualties. Many of us are oblivious to the reality of this war.
The enemy uses all kinds of weapons to attack our hearts. These attacks often come in the form of some circumstance that leads to disappointment and/or discouragement. In these situations, it is necessary to give up temptations, go out into the field and fight the battle from the hand of God.
How do I keep my heart?
We have already said that the phrase “above all guarded things, guard your heart”, basically means that we must take care of it from the contaminations that are in the world. To achieve this, it is necessary to take into account the following tips:
1. Study the Bible
If you want to know how to protect your heart from the things that will take you away from God, the Bible is the best place to start. It is full of tips for living wisely.
2. Spend time in prayer
Protecting your heart means having a healthy relationship with God. That relationship grows as you pray and have conversations with Him.
3. Choose your friends wisely
Choosing good friends seems easy, but sometimes we lose sight of the friends that are good for us, and we choose the ones that seem more fun or flashy. Make sure there is true love in your relationships.
4. Get good advice
When you’re stuck in a situation, turn to a spiritual leader you respect for being strong in their faith.
5. Learn to overcome temptation
We are surrounded by temptation after temptation in our daily lives. Find ways to avoid them or learn how to get out of bad situations.
6. Learn to overcome doubt
Doubt can slowly drag you into a world apart from God. We hear anti-Christian messages every day. Learn to put aside doubt, and strengthen your faith.
After these valuable tips, we can only say the very essence of the topic: “Above all things guarded, guard your heart”, it is the advice that the wisest man in the world gives you and that perhaps life itself can give you. if you are not diligent in protecting that precious treasure.
