Heart Strings

Sometimes one hears or reads a verse and that verse carries with it a certain significance or meaning. For years that verse can retain that meaning until one day you suddenly see it in a different light.

Above all else, guard your heart,
for it is the wellspring of life.
Proverbs 4:23

This verse carried with it a dating significance for me and the meaning was to guard my heart against heartbreak. But heartbreak does not stop up the "wellspring of life."

The heart is very significant to God. The Bible contains 743 references to it. The Lord we serve is one who searches both the mind and the heart. Before we ever confess with our lips, we first confess in our heart. The words that we speak overflow from our hearts. Our hearts ultimately find their rest in God and are restless until they do.

And yet our hearts can be hardened against God. Unforgiveness, bitterness, hatred, etc. can take root like weeds in fertile soil to choke out the blossoming seed. Christ came to establish a new convent in which our darkened hearts, hardened like stones, could be replaced with hearts of flesh. I know that somehow my fellowship with God is intimately intertwined with the condition of my heart. God, who is greater than our hearts, has rescued us by pouring love into our hearts and leaving us a lasting peace as inheritance to guard our hearts before the day judgment. Rejoicing in the goodness of God and resting in the peace from Him which surpasses all understanding safeguards the wellspring of life so that life can be lived abundantly by pursuing Him who first pursued us and walking in the good works for which we were created and which have been laid out before us. Failing to guard our hearts against the snares of the world, like Adam failed to guard the garden, blocks the blessings of God and darkens our knowledge of Him. It stops up the wellspring of life.

The difference between my first understanding and my second is that the first retrains love for fear of pain while the second deepens loves in the hope of the glory secure in the knowledge that nothing in heaven or earth can separate me from the love that is in Christ poured out for me. Perhaps both understandings are true, but I now realize that "guarding my heart" can mean loving recklessly just as much as it can mean dealing cautiously with the world.