[BBC List] wisdom

[Mike Abendroth]

Wisdom Guards the Heart
Proverbs 4:23

Copyright 2004
by
Phil Johnson
All rights reserved.

For more of Phil's sermons and messages go to: HYPERLINK
"http://www.SwordandTrowel.org"www.SwordandTrowel.org

 

What I want to do tonight is pretty much take up where we left off this
morning, talking about spiritual warfare and the fact that one of the key
battlefields in that warfare is the human heart.  I want to look back at the
Book of Proverbs, chapter 4—a single verse—Proverbs 4:23.  I want you to
turn there, even though it’s only one verse, because we will look a bit at
the context.  So, turn there, and while you’re doing that, let me read the
verse.  Proverbs 4:23, “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are
the issues of life.”

 

Now, I want to start by giving you just a very, very short summary of what
that proverb means.  What it’s saying is this: your heart is like a
reservoir and what comes out of it is what determines the quality and the
character of your spiritual life.  If your heart is defiled, it will have
consequences in your behavior, your speech, your attitudes, and every area
of life.  The heart is the wellspring of life itself, and if you pollute the
fountain, you defile all of life.  It’s vital to understand that.  

 

Now, also, one other thing I don’t want you to miss—and let’s not skip
over—is this: that when Scripture speaks of the heart, it’s speaking of your
thought life, the core of your soul, where your thoughts and imaginations
operate.  We sometimes contrast heart and mind in a way that Scripture
really doesn’t.  The heart isn’t set against the mind in Scripture, but
normally, when you see Scripture speaking of the heart, it’s speaking of the
mind or at least—at the very least—including the mind, because the heart is
where Scripture puts the seat of your thought life.  Proverbs 23:7, “As he
thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  So, what you think about and how you
think, the ideas you entertain in the privacy of your own imagination, that
is the true barometer of your spiritual character. 

 

One of the key verses in the New Testament is Mark 7:20-23, where Jesus said
this, “That which cometh out of the man, that defileth the man; for from
within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries,
fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit,
lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, and foolishness.”  Jesus
said, “All these things come from within and defile the man.”  He was
answering people who had charged His disciples with eating with unwashed
hands, and He was saying, you know, “It’s not what goes into you that
defiles you, but what comes out of your heart.”  You cannot entertain wicked
thoughts without being utterly defiled by them.  In fact, that is, is it
not, the very principle our verse is teaching?  “A corrupt tree cannot bring
forth good fruit,” Matthew 7:18, “A contaminated well is unhealthy.”  So,
it’s vital to guard your heart and keep it from every kind of defilement.

 

Now, that’s the meaning of our text.  That’s what it’s teaching.  What I
want to do in this hour is focus on the practical and doctrinal implications
of this command that we’re given in this verse: “Keep your heart with all
diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life,” or, as another version
has it, “Guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”  There are
three clear spiritual and doctrinal ramifications of this verse that I want
to highlight for you tonight.  Number one is the duty of guarding the heart;
second is the difficulty of guarding the heart; and third is the
desirability of guarding the heart.  We’ll look at these one at a time, so,
if you’re taking notes, I’ll try to help you get the main points down.

 

First is the duty of guarding your heart.  The duty of guarding your heart.
This is on the face of it.  Notice, this is an imperative; it’s a command.
There’s a duty that’s clearly set forth in this verse and it’s essential
that we embrace this duty and submit to the command.  In fact, I would say
that this is the chief practical duty of the Christian life as it pertains
to us.  You know, we’re taught by the first question in the Catechism that
man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And that’s what
God made us for—to glorify Him and to enjoy Him—and that’s a fitting
statement of our duty with respect to God, but our first and primary duty
with respect to ourselves, is the duty stated in this verse: “Keep your
heart with all diligence.”  As we’re going to see tonight, that is
ultimately the only way you can glorify God and enjoy him forever.

 

Now, this is not an easy obligation—and we’re going to talk about that when
I get to the second point—but the point here is that it, nonetheless, is an
important duty.  It’s not easy to keep our thoughts pure and holy, but our
sinful thoughts are the first and most important sins we are called to
crucify, mortify, put to death.  We saw that a little bit this morning.
Remember, Jesus taught that those sinful thoughts are the source and the
fountain of all the evil that defiles us.  That’s interesting, isn’t it?  I
mean, Scripture—and Jesus here—is explicitly teaching that you’re not
defiled by sin that rubs off on you from the outside.  Think of it.  Jesus,
perfectly sinless, came to this earth, dwelt among sinners as a man, and the
sin that He lived in the midst of, none of it rubbed off on Him.  Why?
Because there was no sin coming from within to defile him.  The truth is,
our own sinful thoughts, what emanates from our own heart, that is the
source of every problem we have.  That’s what defiles us.  

 

When the apostle Paul commands us to mortify the sin that’s in our members,
his focus is not on external deeds—I read you that verse this morning,
Colossians 3:5—but what he does in Colossians 3:5, when he says, “Mortify
the sin that’s in your members,” he gives a long list of the kinds of sin
that, basically, come out of the thought life.  Sins that are hatched in an
unholy heart; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, covetousness,
evil concupiscence—these are all sins that occur in the mind!  They are sins
of the passion and of the mind.  So, the process of mortifying sin, as we
saw this morning, involves getting control of the mind, the imagination, the
passions, the heart.  Paul is calling for internal purification when he
says, “Mortify the sin that is in your members.”  He’s not calling merely
for the reformation of our external behavior—you understand that, right?
He’s not saying what your mother meant, when you were a child and she said,
“Behave!”  She meant, “Act nice.”  Paul means, “Think nice.”  That’s how
sanctification works.  

 

The focus on sanctification, in Scripture, is always about purifying the
heart and renewing the mind.  We’re transformed by the renewing of our mind.
The outworking of our sanctification, naturally then, results in a change of
behavior.  But a change of behavior, without the renewal of the heart, is
not sanctification at all.  In fact, it’s a form of hypocrisy—and I’ll have
more to say about that as we go, but first, let me give you some practical
steps for guarding your heart.  How can we do this?  What precisely does
this verse require of us?  “Keep thy heart with all diligence”—what does
that mean?  Scripture gives us some clear guidelines for “keeping our heart”
and I want to outline just the basics for you.  So, you ought to write these
down.  If you’re taking notes, again, these are sub-points.  I did this this
morning, I rarely do this, I hate to confuse you with sub-points, but I’ve
got a little list that you need to take down here. 

 

Step one: give your heart to Christ.  You cannot begin to put this principle
into practice unless your heart is surrendered to the Lordship of Christ and
you are devoted to Him in love.  If you’re not a believer in Christ, that
means your heart is not worth keeping!  It’s a heart of stone; it’s cold,
it’s dead, it’s spiritually lifeless.  If you’re not a believer, your heart
is corrupt and sinful and utterly impotent to produce any kind of
righteousness.  You need a wholesale heart renewal, a new heart.  That’s
what Jesus meant when He said, “You need to be born again.”  As Scripture
describes it—you can study this for yourself, in Ezekiel 36—but as Scripture
describes the process of the new birth, regeneration, it’s all about a new
heart, the implantation of a new heart.  The Lord says, “A new heart also
will I give you, and a new spirit I will put within you.  I’ll take out the
stony heart and put in a heart of flesh.”  That is the promise.  That is the
biblical description of the new birth.  That is what theologians refer to as
regeneration.  

 

But, it’s all about a supernatural work of God in the heart.  Essentially, a
spiritual heart transplant.  It is the wholesale renewal of the heart and
the will and the passions.  It’s not something you can do for yourself.  It
involves, in effect, spiritual resurrection: life from the dead.  Without
it, Scripture says, your heart is utterly incapable of any righteousness
whatsoever.  That’s what Romans 8:7-8 means when it says, “The carnal mind
is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither
indeed can be.  So then, they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”  

 

There’re no exceptions to that rule, by the way.  What it means is that
without regeneration, without a new heart, what you have is a heart that is
bereft of any kind of righteousness, incapable of obedience to God, devoid
of any true love for Him, unable to do anything whatsoever to please Him.
That’s really what theologians call the doctrine of total depravity.  I
didn’t make it up; it’s what the Bible teaches.  If you don’t have a
regenerate heart, your heart is not worth keeping, and it’s impossible for
such a heart to produce any true righteousness.  But Christ invites us to
give Him our hearts.  

 

Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 23:26 and says this, “My son, give me thine
heart.”  That’s the voice of wisdom and I believe that that is also the
voice of Christ, who is personified throughout the Book of Proverbs as
wisdom.  You can’t truly give your heart to wisdom without devoting your
heart to Christ.  According to I Corinthians 1:30, “Christ is made, unto us,
wisdom.”  So, if you want to keep your heart, step one is this: give it to
Christ.  Devote it to His wisdom.  Devote it to love for Him.  According to
Ephesians 3:16-17, the way to be “strengthened by might in the inner man” is
to “have Christ dwell in your hearts by faith.”  Give Him your heart.
Embrace Him as the chief object of your love.  Jesus Himself said, “He that
loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that love
his son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.”  If He is not first
in your heart, then you have no hope of keeping your heart pure.  It’s as
simple as that.

 

Step two: crucify your mind.  Mortify your evil thoughts.  I already quoted
Colossians 3:5, “Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the
earth…fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence,
and covetousness, which is idolatry,” but this is a recurring theme in the
Apostle Paul’s writings, this idea of putting to death sin in your body,
mortifying the sin.  Romans 8:13, “If you live after the flesh, you shall
die; but if you, through the Spirit, do mortify the deeds of the body, you
shall live.”  What he’s saying is this: put your evil thoughts to death.
Deal with them ruthlessly.  Don’t allow them any breathing room.  Choke the
life out of them.  Mortify them.  Romans 13:14, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus
Christ and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”


 

By the way, this is one of the marks of the true Christian.  Galatians 5:24
says, “They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections
and lusts.”  We haven’t done it perfectly.  It’s a process of crucifixion,
and that’s a slow death, so those affections and lusts continually come back
to plague us; but if you are truly a believer, then at some point and in
some way, you have begun the process of crucifying these lusts and
affections.  

 

And Paul says continue the process.  Carry it through to the end, because
sinful thoughts are a fierce, deadly enemy that must be met with lethal
force, choked out of existence, rooted up, exterminated, and utterly purged
from our lives.  That’s the only way to deal with sin in your life—any sin.
Understand what Jesus was saying when He said, “All that defiles you comes
from your heart,” He’s saying that every sin that troubles you is hatched in
your mind!  If you can control your mind, if you can mortify that sin that’s
in your mind, that is the pathway to sanctification.  If you don’t do that,
every wicked thought will destroy you, if you don’t destroy it.  And you’ll
never get control of your thought life if you’re not proactive, deliberate,
ruthless in mortifying and putting to death the sin that’s in your heart.

 

Step three: put restraints on your heart that will keep you from
entertaining iniquity in that private arena of your own mind.  Put
restraints on your heart—you can shorten your version to just that—put
restraints on your heart.  Get rid of evil influences.  Don’t watch movies
or read novels that fill your mind with wickedness.  Have some self-control
in what you expose yourself to; in biblical terms, “exercise yourself rather
unto godliness.”

 

Look at the context of our verse now.  Proverbs 4—you should have turned
there—Proverbs 4:20—go back to verse 20: “My son, attend to my words;
incline thine ear unto my sayings.  Let them not depart from thine eyes, and
keep them in the midst of thine heart, for they are life unto those that
find them and health unto all their flesh.”  And then our verse, “Keep thy
heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”  Verse 24,
“Put away from thee a froward [or deceitful mouth], and perverse lips put
far from thee.  Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look
straight before thee.  Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be
established.  Turn not to the right hand or the left; remove thy foot from
evil.”  There’s lots of sound advice about how to guard your heart in that
passage I just read.  Look at it closely.  

 

First of all, if you want to guard your heart, you have to guard your ears,
verse 20, “Attend to my words; incline thine ear to my sayings.”  Be careful
what you fill your ears with.  This verse suggests that the focus of your
hearing ought to be the wisdom of God’s Word.  Be attentive.  Incline your
ears to these sayings.  I’m amazed at what some Christians fill their ears
with.  I could probably tell a lot about the state of your sanctification
just by checking the presets on your car radio, right?  I mean, what that
tells me is what you listen to when you’re alone and can choose to listen
for yourself.  What do you tune into?  What do you tune into?  The shock
jocks with their off-color humor and the angry ranting of certain drive time
radio personalities?  Do you gravitate to music that’s profane and full of
iniquity?  I always wonder why would a Christian ever want to fill his ears
with profanity and lewdness, and how can a godly person derive enjoyment
from those things?  

 

Now, I’m not suggesting that all secular music or humor is evil, but I am
saying, shouldn’t our listening be dominated by that which edifies?  This
passage seems to say so.  Our ears ought to be inclined to the truth of the
Word of God.  If that’s not the focus and predominance of what you listen to
when you’re alone, with time to think and meditate, then you’re probably not
doing a very good job of guarding your heart.  

 

Next: guard your eyes, verse 21: “Don’t let the truth depart from your eyes”
and that’s also echoed in verse 25: “Let thine eyes look right on, and let
thine eyelids look straight before thee.”  Keep your eyes where they ought
to be or you won’t be able to keep your heart where it ought to be—that’s a
simple principle.  Jesus said, in Matthew 6:22-23, “The lamp of the body is
the eye.  If, therefore, your eye is good, your whole body will be full of
light; but if your eye is evil, your whole body shall be full of darkness.”
That’s a good reason not to watch some of the stuff we watch, isn’t it?  Our
culture constantly bombards us with images and entertainment deliberately
designed to appeal to the lust of the eyes, and if you don’t know when to
turn away and refuse to watch, you aren’t doing a very good job of guarding
your heart.

 

And I’m not speaking only about that which is overtly evil.  That’s a given.
I shouldn’t even have to make that point.  But much of what we watch is
simply a waste of time!  That is as detrimental to us, spiritually, as
watching evil things, because it fills our hearts with vain thoughts.  The
Psalmist wrote in Psalm 119:37, “Turn away mine eyes from looking at
worthless things.”  If you sit for hours watching TV—even if you’re only
watching the Fox News Channel or Home and Garden Network—you’re probably not
doing a very good job of guarding your heart.  

 

Here’s another one: guard your conscience, verses 21 and 22 say this: “Keep
these sayings in the midst of your heart, for they are life unto those that
find them and health unto all their flesh.”  When the sage here encourages
us to guard our hearts, he is, in effect, urging us to keep a healthy and
active conscience.  He’s saying we should cultivate a mind and a conscience
that are informed by the Word of God.  In fact, I don’t need to say much
about this; it’s self-evident.  Don’t let the voice of God’s wisdom be
silenced in your own heart by the hardening of your conscience.

 

There’s more, verse 24: guard your tongue, “Put away from you a deceitful
mouth and put perverse lips far from you.”  Proverbs 17:20 says, “He who has
a perverse tongue falls into evil.”  One of the very practical ways you can
mortify sin in your heart is by consciously and carefully restraining its
expression in your speech.  James 3:2 says, “If any man offend not in word,
the same is a perfect man and able also to bridle the whole body.”  If you
can control your tongue, you’ll be able to control your mind too.

 

Here’s another one: guard your feet, verses 26 and 27: “Ponder the path of
thy feet and let all thy ways be established.  Turn not to the right hand or
to the left; remove thy foot from evil.”  In other words, stay away from
places where temptation assaults you.  That’s pretty much just
straightforward, simple wisdom.  Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.”  If you sincerely mean that, then
don’t go places where you know you’re going to be tempted.  It’s pointless
to pray that prayer if you are willingly going to expose yourself to
temptation.  

 

Now, recently I said some of these things in a message—I think in Grace
Life—and someone came to me afterwards and said, “Well, that’s not very
balanced.  Why don’t you warn about the dangers of legalism?  You ought to
do another message,” he said, “and explain why we shouldn’t be legalistic.”
Well, I have preached on legalism before!  I’ve actually preached on
legalism twice from this pulpit and if you want to hear that, you can get
the tape.  But, let me just say that I don’t think legalism is the biggest
temptation most of us face.  If modern evangelicals have an imbalance, it’s
in the other direction, in the direction of worldliness, not legalism.  But,
there’s nothing legalistic about what I’m telling you.  I haven’t given you
any lists or rules about specific things you can and cannot do.  I haven’t
gone beyond what Scripture says.  I’ve only given you a list of principles.
I’m telling you that you ought to avoid temptation.  Again, this is just a
basic principle of spiritual and biblical wisdom; it’s not a complex idea.  

 

Matthew 26:41, “Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation.  The spirit
indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  

 

I Peter 5:8-9, “Be sober, be vigilant because your adversary, the devil,
walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”  “Resist him,”
Peter says, “steadfast in the faith.”

 

You’re in Proverbs 4…  Look down at verses 14 and 15, “Do not enter the path
of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of evil.”  Avoid it.  Do not
travel on it.  Turn away from it and pass on.  Don’t “walk in the counsel of
the ungodly, or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of the
scornful,” and if that sounds legalistic to you, you’re probably having a
hard time guarding your heart.

 

Two more things, and then I’ll move on to the next point.  Keeping your
heart also involves a watchful, cautious self-control over your emotions.
Don’t let your emotions drive or control your mind, but vice versa.
Emotions are good, but in their place, just like your arms are good, but
they’re not for walking.  Your nose is good, but it’s not very good for
driving nails.  In the same way, your emotions are good, but they’re not for
thinking.  Scripture condemns the person who thinks with his emotions.
James 3:14-15 refers to that kind of thinking as “sensual wisdom”: wisdom
driven by the senses, thinking that is driven by the emotions.  James says
this: “This wisdom descendeth not from above”—this sensual wisdom—“but is
earthly, sensual, devilish.”  He says it produces “bitter envying and strife
in the heart.”  

 

Listen to Richard Baxter, the great Puritan author.  He said this: “Keep
out”—or cast out—“all inordinate passions, for passions violently press the
thoughts and forcibly carry them away.  If anger or grief or pleasure be
allowed in, they will command your thoughts.”

 

Another writer says it like this—and I like this—he says, “Emotions are like
screaming kids.  Until you calm them down, you can’t be heard.  If you want
to get rid of your bad thoughts, control your emotions.”  That’s good
advice.  

 

But, finally and above all, the thing that sums all of this up: control your
thoughts.  This is the whole point, and this is the area where the virtue of
self-control is most important.  This is the one area where your battle for
self-control will be won or lost: your thought life.  If you willingly and
deliberately allow yourself to indulge in evil thoughts or wicked fantasies,
what this verse says is you’re filling the wellspring of your life with
poison—and nothing is more self-destructive!  “Watch over your heart with
all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.”  We’re talking about
spiritual warfare this morning.  This is classic warfare issue, right?  

 

I mean, we’ve got this reservoir up here that feeds water to most of the San
Fernando Valley…  And you realize, don’t you, that since the terrorist
situation has become such a problem, that thing is guarded carefully,
constantly!  Because it’s a great danger if anyone would poison that
reservoir.  The Scripture is saying, “Your heart’s like that.  Keep it pure.
Out of it flow the springs of life.”

 

Now, let’s move on.  That’s the first implication of our text: the duty of
guarding the heart.  So, doctrine number one that we want to draw from this
text is this: it is your bound and duty to keep your heart.  You need to do
it carefully and diligently and conscientiously, and that’s a good place to
make the transition to doctrine number two.  

 

Doctrine number two is the difficulty of guarding the heart.  Our text
implies that keeping the heart is not an easy task.  This is not something
that comes naturally.  “Keep thy heart,” he says, “with all diligence.”
This is not something that comes easy for anybody.  It requires diligence.
It’s not something that you can do passively.  It calls for effort,
perseverance, persistence, constancy, and industry—diligence.  It’s a
struggle.  And that’s all an understatement, really.  

 

Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked; who can know it?”  

 

Genesis 8:21, God himself says, “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from
his youth.” 

 

According to Psalm 51:5, we are “shapen in iniquity.”

 

Solomon said, in Ecclesiastes 9:3, “The heart of the sons of men is full of
evil, and madness is in their heart while they live.”

 

We are all hopelessly, desperately, and completely wicked in and of
ourselves.  That is the state of every fallen human heart.  Again, that’s
the doctrine of total depravity.  Romans 3:10, “As it is written: ‘There is
none righteous; no, not one.”  Nobody escapes this verdict.  

 

Now, remember that all the sin we struggle with emanates from our own
hearts.  Matthew 15:19-20 (this is a cross-reference to the one I read
earlier), Jesus says, “For out the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders,
adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies…These are the
things which defile a man.”  So, the heart is the source of our problem in
the first place.  We have to guard our heart, not only from evil outside
influences, but, more importantly, from the evil that breeds right there
within.

 

Proverbs 28:26, “He that trusts his own heart is a fool.”  Here’s a good
lesson: you can never trust your own heart too little, and you can never
trust God too much.  We face perpetual threats to the purity of our hearts.
We’ve already mentioned some.  Vain thoughts, mindless, trivial matters that
we give our attention to, the pleasures of sin entice us, the lure of the
world, the wiles of the devil, the sinful tendencies of our own flesh—all of
those things appeal to the wickedness and corruption that lies in our
hearts, and that wickedness that’s inside of us is ready to respond to any
kind of catalyst.  And you cannot cleanse your own heart.  This is not a
problem we can fix for ourselves.  

 

Proverbs 20:9, “Who can say, ‘I have made my heart clean; I am pure from my
sin’?”  The implied answer is nobody can say that.  

 

Job 14:4, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean one?”  No one!  

 

I John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the
truth is not in us.”  

 

So, this is a huge problem.  Our hearts are desperately wicked—and we can’t
change that, Scripture says, any more than the leopard can change his spots.
It’s part of our nature.  We can pretend that we’re basically good—that’s
what a lot of people do—but that doesn’t change reality.  The great Scottish
Puritan, Andrew Grey, said this—and I love this statement—he said, “We
conceive that if there were a window opened in each of our bosoms, through
which each one of us that are here might behold one another’s hearts, we
would become monsters and wonders to one another, and to ourselves likewise,
and we might cry out, “Oh, where is the God of judgment that takes no
vengeance on such deceitful hearts?”  If our hearts, he says, were turned
inside out, so to speak, and we saw the insides of our hearts, we would
wonder at God’s patience.  That’s true.  I know that’s true because I’ve
peeked in my own heart.  Our hearts are breeding grounds for all kinds of
evil.  According to I John 1:10, if you think you’re an exception to this
rule, you are self-deceived.  You’re calling God a liar, and His Word is not
in you.  

 

To quote Proverbs 28:26 one more time, “He who trusts in his own heart is a
fool.”  That’s why it is no simple task to keep your heart pure.  Remember
that Adam had a heart that wasn’t even already defiled by sin, and he kept
it pure only a very short time.  The fall occurred before he and Eve had
ever conceived a child.  It must have been very soon after their creation.
That shows the difficulty of keeping a pure heart.  That also gives us some
perspective on what kind of diligence is required for the keeping of our
hearts.  This is something we have to do constantly.  If you keep your heart
only part-time pure, that’s nothing but hypocrisy.  It’s an abomination to
God.  If the only time you think about these things or the only time you
ever strive to obey, even, is when you’re listening to a message on the
subject or when you come to the Lord’s Table or when it’s otherwise
convenient to examine yourself, then all you’re doing is practicing the
religion of the Pharisees.  You’re merely honing the skill of hypocrisy.  

 

Face it, there are times when it’s fairly easy to guard our hearts.  When
we’re under affliction, when we’re under conviction, when we’re in church,
or when we’re in public it’s much easier to keep our hearts pure and focused
than when we’re alone, in private, or enjoying our leisure.  And, frankly,
that’s why trials—that’s one major reason—why trials and difficulties are
good for us.  That’s why, when God providentially sends us trials and
afflictions, it’s sometimes an act of mercy on His part, because when
circumstances force us to be dependent on the Lord, our hearts stay fixed on
Him.  But the real test of obedience in this matter is whether you keep your
heart pure in private, when you’re alone, when things are going well, when
you have opportunities to rest from all the cares of life—your leisure time.
That’s when it’s most vital to keep careful watch over your heart!  Sadly,
that is precisely where most of us fail so miserably.  

 

What’s the solution?  Well, you could devote yourself especially, in your
leisure time, to the task of cultivating humility, repentance, holiness, and
the fear of God.  Give your private life to God.  It’s relatively easy to be
a Christian in public.  It’s fairly simple to search your heart and examine
your life if you do it only once a week or if you limit your self
examination to those times when you come before the Lord’s Table, but if you
do that, God despises your worship.  

 

Listen to Isaiah 66:2-4.  The Lord says this, “To this man will I look, even
to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my Word.”
And then it says this: “He that killeth an ox”—and it’s talking here about
sacrifices for sin—“is as if he slew a man and he that sacrifices a lamb is
as if he cut off a dog’s neck; he that offers an oblation as if he offered
swine’s blood; he that burned incense as if he blessed an idol.  Yea, they
have chosen their own ways and their soul delighted in their abominations.”
And the Lord says this: “I will also chose their delusions and bring their
fears upon them because when I called, none did answer; when I spoke, they
did not hear, but they did evil before mine eyes and chose that in which I
delighted not.” 

 

In other words, God’s saying, if you choose your own way, if your private
life is devoted purely to personal pleasure, where you seek delight in what
God deems abominable, then when you come to worship, your worship is
unacceptable.  It’s repulsive to God.  Your sacrifice, He says, is no more
valid than if you’d offered pig’s blood!  Graphic language, isn’t it?  But
what its saying is that your supposed service to God—if you’re a
hypocrite—your service to Him offends Him.  You may think you’re sacrificing
a lamb, but it’s no more acceptable to God than if you cut off a dog’s neck
and offered that to him.  It’s a repulsive picture, isn’t it?  It’s summed
up for us in Proverbs 15:8, which says, “The sacrifice of the wicked is an
abomination to the Lord.”

 

So, what’s acceptable to God?  Well, I just read it.  Isaiah 66:2, “Him that
is of a poor and contrite spirit, and trembles at my Word.”  

 

Psalm 51:17 says the same thing, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.”  Notice, it’s
the offering of our hearts that is acceptable to God!  And, by definition,
you cannot do that on a part-time basis.  If God is to have our hearts, He
must have the whole heart.  That’s a difficult duty, but think about it.
That is the substance of the first and great commandment, Matthew 22:37,
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and
all thy mind.”  

 

So, we’ve seen the duty of guarding our hearts and the difficulty of
guarding our hearts; here, quickly, is a third doctrine we can glean from
this text: the desirability of guarding the heart.  Look at the text again.
“Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of
life.”  It’s sheer folly not to guard your heart, because it’s spiritual
suicide!  It’s unbelievably self-destructive.  It’s a sure way to ruin your
life.  Poison the wellspring with evil?  Don’t ever trivialize the sins you
commit in the privacy of your own heart.  Don’t think for a moment that you
can entertain sin in your mind without any danger to your soul, because the
sin you cultivate in your imagination directly assaults your soul.  It
assaults your conscience.  It poisons your mind.  When you engage in evil
thoughts, you are pouring poison directly into the well that supplies all of
your life—and you will reap what you sow.  

 

Cultivating sinful desires removes every barrier from the will that might
otherwise keep you from doing the deed.  If you imagine it, you will do it.
The thought is the parent of the deed.  If you foster a desire for sin, you
will succumb when temptation presents itself; you won’t have any defense
against it.  Micah 2:1 says, “Woe to them that devise iniquity and work evil
upon their beds.”  He’s talking about people who lie in bed at night and
imagine the evil things they might do, or derive enjoyment from fantasies
about evil.  And he says this: “When the morning is light, they practice it
because it is in the power of their hand.”  In other words, when the
opportunity comes in real life, in the light of day—if opportunity presents
itself and you’ve imagined it and enjoyed and thought pleasantly of that
evil imagination, you will do it…when the opportunity comes by.  

 

Hosea says the same thing, but listen to the vivid imagery he uses.  Hosea
7:6-7, “For they have made ready their heart like an oven, whiles they lie
in wait: their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth as a
flaming fire.  They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges;
all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto Me.”
He’s comparing the mind to an oven where you bake the deeds that come out in
your life, and he says, to stoke that oven with evil thoughts is to fan
those flames and it will be destructive.  To stoke the mind with evil
thoughts is to fan the flames of evil and, if you do that, you won’t have
any will to resist when temptation comes.  

 

Proverbs 25:28 says, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a
city that is broken down and without walls.”  So, guard your heart!  It’s
the wellspring of your life.  If you defile the fountain, you destroy
yourself.  

 

Galatians 6:7, “God is not mocked.  For whatever a man sows, that also shall
he reap.”  That, in and of itself, is a good reason why we ought to guard
our hearts.  It’s the only way to safeguard our own well-being.  

 

But there’s something even more serious at stake here than your earthly
reputation and happiness.  When you give your heart to evil thoughts, by
entertaining evil in your hearts you incur the wrath of God.  Psalm 66:18
says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”  

 

Job said something similar.  He knew something about keeping his heart pure,
didn’t he?  And he also experienced God’s grace in the midst of his trials.
But he said this: “What is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained?
When God takes away his soul, will God hear his cry when trouble comes upon
him?”  Did you realize that it’s the heart and not merely the behavior that
God sees and judges?  

 

In I Chronicles 29:17, David prays this: “I know also, my God, that thou
triest the heart, and hast pleasure in uprightness.”  

 

Jeremiah 17:10, God Himself says this: “I, the Lord, search the heart”—I
test the mind!—“even to give to every man according to his ways, according
to the fruit of his doings.”

 

Do you understand that?  God is saying…not that He looks at what we do and
then judges us accordingly, but that He looks at our hearts and judges us
according to that.  Revelation 2:23 is an echo of that: “I am He who
searches the minds and the hearts and I will give to each one of you
according to your works.”  God sees every thought of your heart, and He
knows your heart perfectly.

 

Psalm 44:20-21, “If we had forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out
own hands to a foreign god, would not God search this out?  For He knows the
secrets of the heart.”

 

Jeremiah 20:12 says, “God sees the mind and the heart.”  

 

I Chronicles 28:9 says, “The Lord searches all hearts and understands all
the imaginations of all of our thoughts.”

 

In Solomon’s Prayer of Dedication for the Temple, he said this (I Kings
8:39): “Thou even, Thou only knowest the hearts of all the children of men.”

 

Hebrews 4:13 says, “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in
His sight, but all things are naked and open unto God’s eyes.”

 

Scripture is full of this truth.  God sees our hearts.  If you would blush
to have the secret thoughts of your heart made manifest for everyone in this
room to see, you ought to tremble at the reality that God already sees those
thoughts and knows them altogether.  Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall see God.”  Hebrews 12:14 adds this: “Without holiness,
no man shall see the Lord.”  So, this is a vitally important matter.  It
underscores the desirability of guarding our hearts.  An impure heart can
ruin us for life and all eternity.  There’s no advantage, frankly, to
poisoning the wellspring of your heart.  

 

So, where do we go for a pure heart?  I’ve already spoken of the utter
impossibility of cleansing your own heart.  What do we do with defiled
hearts?  Well, first and most obviously, we have to repent of the impurity.
David wrote, in Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a
broken and contrite heart, Thou wilt not despise.”  He’s talking there about
repentance.  

 

Second, while we can’t cleanse our own hearts, God Himself can cleanse us.
That’s why David prayed also in Psalm 51:19, “Create in me a clean heart, O
God, and renew a right spirit within me.”  

 

Again, if you’re an unbeliever—if you have never trusted Christ for
salvation—what you need is a new heart.  I’ve already quoted Ezekiel
36:25-26, where God describes the work of regeneration.  Actually, I
referred to it and quoted a snippet of it.  Let me quote it again.  God says
this: “I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you shall be clean; from all
your filthiness and from all your idols, I will cleanse you.  A new heart
also I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you.  I will take
away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of
flesh.”  Acts 15:9 says, “God purifies our hearts by faith.”  Malachi 3:2
says this about Christ: “He’s like a refiner’s fire and like a fuller’s
soap.”  He can do that work of cleansing that we so desperately need and
cannot do for ourselves.  

 

If you’re a Christian, part of the work of your sanctification is to go to
Him regularly for that kind of forgiveness and cleansing.  If we “confess
our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.”  God promises forgiveness from our sins and He
imparts to us his own Spirit.  That is what enables us to know His mind, to
equip us to think righteous thoughts, to empower us to obey his
commandments.  And although we still don’t do that perfectly—because of the
weakness of our flesh and the imperfections of our fallenness—Christ,
Scripture says, clothes us in the garments of his perfect righteousness so
that we can stand before God without fear of condemnation.  That’s the
gospel message, and that is the greatest incentive I know for filling our
hearts and minds with thoughts of Christ and His glory.

 

Let’s close in prayer.

 

Lord, our hearts are humbled by the duty that is set forth before us in this
verse. Guard our hearts with all diligence.  We confess that we have not
done that as we should; we don’t do that as we should.  Lord, we seek Your
cleansing and thank You for the promise of that cleansing, and we pray with
David, the psalmist, that You would create in us and constantly recreate in
us pure and clean hearts for the glory of Christ in whose name we pray.
Amen.

 

 

Charis, 
  
Mike Abendroth 
  
"Make us choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to
be contented with half truth when whole truth can be won.  Endow us with
courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns
to compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when right and truth
are in jeopardy."

 - West Point Military Academy Cadet Prayer 

 

HYPERLINK "http://www.bbcchurch.org"www.bbcchurch.org 
  

 


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