Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father, remind us again of the foolishness of trusting our hearts about anything. Father, the most important things in life will always carry with them the temptation to trust our own hearts. May it never be. Father, help us to turn to you instead. May we not indulge our preferences, but instead, seek your will. May we not prize our traditions but instead seek the Spirit within us to shape the patterns of our living. May we not consider ourselves wise to know good from evil, but instead, help us to deny ourselves, carry our crosses, and follow desperately after Jesus. In the powerful name of Jesus help us to guard our hearts and never to trust them! Amen.
Your Morning Song: "What If I Stumble?" by DC Talk
Your Morning Scripture: Jeremiah 17:9 & Proverbs 4:23
The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
~
Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.
...
I am not upset that the world around us cries out some form of, "follow your heart!" In our culture of self-worship and self-gratification, this is the perfect mantra to sum this present culture of Self above all.
"Follow your heart."
What upsets me is when God's kids say it. A sincere, Bible-believing Child of God really should know better.
But let's be fair. Perhaps this is not a conversation you've had with someone before. So what's up with the heart? Why do I find it so unsettling and so disturbing when Christians parrot this worldly mantra, "follow your heart"?
The math is simple, the formula very straight-forward.
The heart is deceitfully wicked. How much so? Above all things. And it is sick. How sick? Desperately. Our hearts cannot be trusted when it comes to deciding what is good and what is evil, what to do and not to do.
How then should we treat our hearts? By guarding them. For though our hearts are desperately sick and deceitful above all things, our hearts are still the foundational piece of who we are. There is nothing below the heart. The whole of who we are rests atop our hearts.
Everything we do, think, say, and feel come from out of our hearts.
And so we are to guard our hearts.
But how? What does that even mean?
Surrender your heart to Jesus, once for all and then over and over again for forever. When we give our hearts, the bottom, the sole of the soul, the deepest expression of our selves, to Jesus, this means several things.
We turn to God to learn what is good and what is evil. He gives us Himself. Loved by the Father, saved by the Son, and cleansed afresh and anew by the Spirit, we surrender our understanding of ourselves and this world we broke to God. And our hearts follow, turning ever more to God's Will at the delightful expense of our own.
Guard your heart with what God has given us, discipline in prayer, reading your Bible, worship, and deep, iron-sharpens-iron fellowship with His people.
Do not trust your heart. Or do, and know no joy, no peace, no satisfaction, no good thing. God will not make your guard your heart. You must choose to do it His way. For His is the only way.
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