HEART OF THE MATTER

“You shall love the Lord your God with ALL YOUR HEART, with all your soul, and with all your mind” – Matthew 22:37

In most of life’s settings, the matter of the heart is often the HEART of the MATTER: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your HEART, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mt.22:37). Our heart matters more than our experience, knowledge, or skills. It represents the totality of our being; the centre of our cognition, affection, choices, decisions, devotion, intentionality, obedience, volition, and action.

The physical heart is essential and crucial for living. When the heart stops life stops. The beat of the heart is proof and evidence of life; no pulse, no life! As Christians we don’t just have a physical heart that produces physical life; we also have a spiritual heart that produces spiritual life. Proverbs 4:23 and related scriptures emphasize the importance of the heart by instructing us to guard it.

Ideally, the heart is where we’re meant to make our life decisions. Every choice we make; everything we decide on ought to come from our heart. Salvation is one of the most important of such decisions and it is intricately connected to the heart: “That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your HEART that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the HEART one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Rom.10:9-10). The heart therefore plays a vital role in our decision making starting with the decision to follow Jesus. Since everything we do flows out of our heart, then it makes sense to put a hedge or guard around it so we can protect it from corruption, contamination, and pollution.

The heart works on the computer-related principle of GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. If one puts garbage programming into a computer, the output will be garbage. The heart works exactly the same way. Our choices and decisions are a result of the things we feed our heart or mind. If we put the right stuff in we’ll get the right stuff out but the reverse of this is also true. Guarding your heart is making sure we’re keeping the wrong influences out because these things will ultimately affect our decisions. We’ve examined few motivations for guarding our heart: it is immensely valuable; it is the source of everything we do; and it is the enemy’s target.

Other motivations that make our heart the heart of the matter are: our love for God; primacy of purpose; and strength to finish strong.

Loving God and maintaining close fellowship with Him should be the motivation and driving factor behind guarding our hearts. This is similar to how we place certain guards or hedges to protect our spousal relationship because we love and don’t want to hurt them in any way. Why would we want to fill our heart with anything that can drive a wedge between us and God?

Guarding the heart is what it’ll take to accomplish the plan and purpose that God has for us. These also flow out of our heart. Everything that God wants to accomplish in our lives comes down to choice and decision. The difference between walking in God’s plan for our lives and not walking in it is the choices we make. Since there is nothing more satisfying on this earth than doing God’s will, we should do everything we can to keep in line with what God desires us to do. His purpose in your life hinges on our heart.

We guard our heart so we can finish strong. Whatever the game or sport we engage in, we must get to the end of the game or the fight to be declared the winner. It doesn’t matter that a person was ahead on life’s scorecard, getting careless may lead to a knock-out, while diligence and discipline would result in victory and triumph. The same is true in our walk with God. How we finish is as important as how we start. We want to finish strong, without ever getting knocked-out or disqualified.