The God-Guarded Heart

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

A Heart Problem

When my husband was fresh out of seminary and newly appointed to his first church, our family moved to a small, rural town near the coast. We were still a young family with small children and we moved hours away from relatives, friends, and the town in which I had lived most of my life. Reeling from change, I found myself sad and lonely. While I tried as best as I could to love the people of the church where my husband served, my heart ached, not only for what I left behind but also from the realization of what life with a clergy spouse might mean for my personal dreams and ambitions. My sense of security and significance felt threatened by the seemingly endless number of life decisions to which we had surrendered control. I hid my sadness and it soon turned to resentment. Add to this mix the inevitable conflicts of parish and institutional church life and my heart became hardened towards the church and her people. 

As you can imagine, this is a bad spiritual, emotional, and psychological place for a pastor’s spouse. I struggled to varying degrees with bitterness and anger for the first several years of my husband’s career in ministry. Finally after the realization that I was in bondage to my anger, and admitting that I needed help, the Lord began to deliver me from the sin and inner shame of my lovelessness, and taught me what continues to be for me one of the most important lessons of Christian life: 

“Above all else guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:28).

In theory this is a simple idea, but when my eyes landed on those words in Proverbs during that season of my life, I knew with absolute certainty that I had failed in this scriptural directive. I knew this because at the time I was living with the acute consequences of my hard-heartedness. It was difficult for me to extend compassion and empathy towards people. I did not easily trust, nor did I feel safe being vulnerable–even with people I loved. I had left my heart unguarded to anger and self-pity. I had not disciplined its jealousy, selfishness, or suspicious tendencies. And most injurious of all, I ignored the Holy Spirit’s goodness and comfort in times of trial. I found myself hiding a general attitude of ingratitude and antipathy. 

Unsurprisingly, God’s voice within my own spirit had become a faint whisper. To be clear, I didn’t embrace these heart-postures conscious of what the outcomes would be. Like many people who experience injury from relational conflict I believed my thinking, emotions and responses were all justified. It simply did not occur to me that my lack of compassion towards a few people would result in a coldness and severity in my overall temperament and way of thinking, thereby affecting my interactions with everyone. Nor did it occur to me, despite many scripture passages to the contrary, that by hating my brothers and sisters in Christ, I was cutting myself off from God himself. By the time I realized there was a problem I had a full-blown spiritual stronghold.

What is the Human Heart?

The human heart is the most important internal territory for which Christ asks us to contend. Our hearts are the desired dwelling places of the living God, and, in its unregenerate state, the place from which sinful actions are born. The writers of scripture speak frequently of the human heart as the seat of human will, desire, and wisdom. Those who are pure in heart are able to discern God’s will and identity, as Jesus himself states in the beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). 

Conversely it was the disciples’ hard-heartedness that prevented them from knowing Jesus’ true nature. After Jesus performed the miracle of feeding the 5000, and then walked across open water on a blustery evening, calming the very elements of nature by his presence, the disciples were “completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened” (Mark 6:51-52). The heart is the place of internal rumination and awe as Luke describes in Luke 2:19 when he says Mary “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” And in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus exhorts those listening to the Sermon on the Mount to store up imperishable heavenly treasure rather than perishable earthly treasure, “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). 

The human heart is also called “deceitful above all things and beyond cure” in Jeremiah 17:9, and in Psalm 78 the psalmist describes the hearts of Israelites as “not loyal to [God]” and “not faithful to his covenant.” I could go on. The human heart can be, by God’s grace, faithful, full of wisdom, pure and righteous. It can also be hard, lacking compassion and comprehension, wrathful and rebellious. More than temperament and emotion, the heart is the ground upon which the seeds of the gospel are sown, and its wellbeing and fruitfulness are not automatic outcomes of strewn seeds over dirt. A tender heart that is faithful no matter the circumstance requires discipline and an abiding concern for the role of the heart as the means of union and fellowship with God. 

What is the Guarded Heart?

Verses 10 through 12 of psalm 51 begin, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me” (Ps 51: 10-12). As with every other aspect of our purification and sanctification it is only because of God’s action and his proximity to us that we can have hearts unburdened by sin. In Ezekiel 36:26, Ezekiel prophesies the manner in which God will accomplish this task when he says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” The nature of our task is to receive the gift of God’s purifying grace on his terms, like children trusting the goodness and trustworthiness of the one giving the gift. 

This is a facet of Christian life which is easy enough to affirm with words, and a very different thing actually to do. The desire to be the arbiters of our own destinies and the internal discomfort inherent in rejecting our human urges can be so profound sometimes we would rather, like Cain, reject Godly correction and guidance to our peril. Or like Ananias and Sapphira we may find ourselves struggling to rationalize ways to satisfy both God’s desires for us, and the selfish desires of our hearts. Guarding our hearts is not mere rule-following, nor is it only rejection of sin, nor is it the more evolved self-awareness of Proverbs 29:11 that acknowledges the liability of unchecked emotions. The guarded heart exists in an ongoing state of inner reflection that evaluates the root motivation of all our feelings, thoughts, and actions. The guarded heart asks: Why am I feeling this way, thinking these thoughts, behaving in this manner? And what does this reveal of my beliefs about God? Of what lie or wrong belief must I repent so that God may continue his work of sanctifying me through and through? My own emotions and behaviors revealed a severe deficit of trust in God’s goodness, his vision for my life, and his ability to protect me from untrustworthy people, so much so I walked through my life in abject defeat revealing my underlying belief that there was no just recourse or love that could heal my inner being. Many of us are similarly afflicted right now even though we are victorious in Christ’s salvation. 

Enduring Under God’s Protection

Scripture repeatedly calls us to endure, stand firm, and wait patiently in faith, and to count our trials as joy. The writers of scripture do this because they know in our regenerated state, with our soft hearts, we have the ability to reject sin and rely on God’s protection as Paul encourages the Ephesians when he tells them to put on the armor of God: 

Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God (Ephesians 6: 13-16).

When we shelter our hearts under the breastplate of God’s righteousness, conforming ourselves to its shape, we no longer live under the yoke of joyless longsuffering. I am not trying to make the case that we should avoid acknowledging emotional pain, far from it. When we guard our hearts with the truth of who God is, we experience our pain in the security of his perfect love, and there we are promised an exchange of beauty for ashes.

Maggie Ulmer is Resource Director for Spirit & Truth, Managing Editor of Firebrand, and one of the hosts of Plain Truth: A Holy-Spirited Podcast.