by Cris Corzine-McCloskey
I have been thinking a lot lately about the scripture in Proverbs 4:23 where God warns us to “guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” On the surface this seems like a pretty straight-forward verse except for one problem, there is no instruction on what we are to guard it from. Unfortunately, I spent many years thinking that I was supposed to guard my heart against people, but the further I go in my walk with Christ, the less that definition seems plausible. Indeed, guarding our hearts against people is the very antithesis of 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, where we are told that love keeps no record of wrongs, is not self-seeking, and always believes the best. So, what are we to guard it against?
Recently, while sitting in a marriage counseling session, watching a couple who had built such walls of resentment and unforgiveness around their hearts toward one another, I had my answer. We are to guard our hearts against offense, bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness, and all that other muck and guck that stymies the Christian life and destroys our witness. In times such as these we cannot afford to be offended. Not by the world we are called to love and minister to, and certainly not in our own homes and churches. Jesus did not go through all the agony of death on a cross just to get us to heaven. His intention was to put His Spirit inside us so we could become love, and therefore demonstrate that love to a lost and hurting world that is in desperate need of truth.
Furthermore, if we can’t get this thing called ‘love’ right in our own homes, what hope do we have of showing it to the rest of the world? I think this is truly the bait of Satan, who knows that once he gets our heart full of resentment toward one person, being offended becomes a way of life. As the scripture says, guard your heart, because everything you do comes out of your heart. Oh my! That means that if my heart is full of muck and guck like bitterness and anger, my life is going to be full of muck and guck. I don’t know about you, but I do not want a life full of hurt and sorrow. Moreover, according to that scripture, others are not in charge of the heart-guarding, I am. Re-stated, it doesn’t matter how they treat me, I am responsible for keeping my heart free of bitterness and offense. Without a clean heart, guarded against muck and guck, I have no hope of becoming love, in my home or out.
Fortunately, we have a Savior who not only modeled this concept, but then He died, and put His Spirit inside us to give us a much needed assist in this area. You see, Jesus knew how hard this would be for us, so when He said that “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5), He was anticipating our need in this area. What it boils down to is this, we cannot let anything that people do to us bear more weight in our life that what Jesus did for us. He wants you to take His death, burial, and resurrection that personal. Next time, we will talk about how to apply this concept directly to where you hurt, and I hope you get some muck and guck out of your heart. Until then, forgive like you have been forgiven by God, and love like there is no tomorrow.
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