As I am writing this today, I am at a hospital in Dallas waiting for my niece, Colby to come out of a procedure to correct a heart condition she has had from birth but only recently became aware that it existed. It has caused me to question what things are affecting our hearts that we are not even aware of. The Word of God has so much to say about how to take care of our heart. Jesus in Proverbs 4:23 and scripture after scripture reminds us that the spiritual condition of our heart will determine the course of our life.
Obviously, the condition of your heart does not affect how much God loves you or how he sees you because he sees you as perfect in Jesus. The condition of your heart does affect how you see and relate to God. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). “God never condemns us but loves us unconditionally” (Romans 8:1).
The heart is affected by what we are looking at, the people we hang out with, what we are listening to, what we are reading, what we are watching (including Netflix), whom we are speaking to, the universities we attend, or just what we are focused on. It also holds the pain from our past experiences – the hurtful things that significant people in our lives said to us, the untrue things that we have come to believe about ourselves, our plans that did not work out how we hoped and all those other things that we have just not been able to resolve so we just lock them away. Interesting how we often trust ourselves more than God to make things make sense. We try so hard to “fix” ourselves which often just ends in creating destructive life patterns and more heartache.
We guard what we have that we consider valuable. We guard our houses and cars by locking the doors. We guard other expensive possessions, like jewelry, by keeping them in a safe. We guard our money in our accounts with pin numbers. We guard our health by exercising and eating right. We guard our families from danger online by strict privacy settings. So, why are we not guarding access to our hearts? This year I started to realize how many times a day I login to something on my phone or computer, so I started using passwords that reference scriptures to remind to do a heart check. Now I heart check myself multiple times every day to make me more conscious of what I am exposing my heart to – both good and bad. Remember, we do not give our passwords out to just anyone.
The heart is like a conduit for the power of the Holy Spirit to flow out to our mind, body, soul, and all that God desires to do in and through us. If we put the world in, we get the world out but when we give God full access, we gain the life he created within us.
