With Valentine’s Day approaching I was thinking about the things that represent Valentine’s Day and the symbols around the holiday. The most popular symbols are LOVE, gifts, chocolate, and hearts. I wanted to focus a little bit on your heart today. Not your physical heart but your spiritual heart. It’s time for a heart checkup!
Our physical heart is an extremely important part of lives. If it’s not working properly it will cause many problems and we could ultimately die. That’s why it’s so important that we eat right, exercise and take care of ourselves. So it is with our spiritual heart. What the physical heart is to our body the spiritual heart is to our spiritual life. If we don’t take care of our spiritual health we can also die.
Proverbs 4:23 says “Guard your heart above all else for it is the source of life.“
That verse got me to thinking (It can be scary when I get to thinking 🙂 If my spiritual heart isn’t being filled with the right things then my spiritual life won’t be healthy and I won’t live the abundant life.
Hmmm….that grabbed my attention.
What am I putting in my heart? Am I guarding my heart? How do I guard my heart?
Am I acting anyway I want? Am I watching anything I want? Listening to anything I want thinking it doesn’t matter? Am I being honest? Am I kind & loving?
How is my attitude? Am I angry? Bitter? Discontent? Depressed? Anxious? Am I selfish, Is it all about me?
The above things are all signs of heart disease.
What does it really mean when the Bible talks about our heart?
Humans are made up of 3 parts:
- Body, which helps you relate to the physical world
- Spirit, which allows you to relate to God
- Soul, which allows you to relate to yourself. It’s what makes you unique! It’s your personality. It’s YOU!
Your soul is made up of 4 parts:
- Mind- your thoughts
- Will- your ambitions
- Emotions- your feelings
- Conscience- your moral compass
The heart is the centerpiece of your soul.
Look at the 4 part of our soul. Can you see why the enemy wants our heart so bad?
- Mind- He wants to distort our view of God, His word, the way we see ourselves so we are so crippled we can’t move on. Ever heard the comment, the battle is in the mind?
- Will- he wants your ambitions off eternal things. He wants your ambitions all about yourself.
- Emotions- he will mess with your feelings getting you to make decisions while angry. He will lay traps to keep you angry, bitter and living in unforgiveness.
- Conscience- he so wants to sway you to live in a way that doesn’t align with God’s word.
Action Steps:
Where have you seen satan work in your life in these four areas?
- Mind
- Will
- Emotions
- Conscience
Mind- For me, he has planted seeds in my mind that I’m not worth anything, that I’m not enough, too much, that God really doesn’t have my best interest at heart. I have to fight these lies. I have to take them captive and replace them with the truth. This is guarding my heart. No, it’s not easy, but it’s necessary.
Will- he has so jacked around my ambitions that at one point I took them and locked them up. I’m slowly allowing God to bring them to the light and we are dusting them off and I’m relying on God to help me guard my heart in this area of my life.
Emotions- for years and years my emotions ruled my life and almost all of my decisions. Most of the time I was reacting instead of being proactive. Feelings can become an idol and mine sure did. We can’t change what we are’t aware of and Jesus and I are working on me not allowing my emotions to control my life. I’m learning how to rely on the Holy Spirit to guide me.
Conscience- For years I had an over active conscience. I lived in a state of guilt and condemnation thinking if I made one wrong move I was done for. Satan had control of that conscience. He has been renewing my soul and with that that condemning conscience isn’t ruling my life.
What can you do this week to guard your heart in these 4 areas?
Pray and ask God to show you how you can guard your heart in these areas this week. He wants you to live the abundant life!
- Mind
- Will
- Emotions
- Conscience
Just like over time our physical health can slowly deteriorate our spiritual health can as well. Don’t we want to live vibrant healthy lives? Let’s guard our hearts!
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its very rare that your run into an article that has the potential to transform your life, this article is one of those. I agree and even feel that protecting our spiritual heart should be center piece of our existence. Many thanks for writing this!