The Excellence of the Guard; My Conclusion

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Our hearts hold untold treasures. Go ahead, try to list them. That's sure to renew your joy!

We’ve also stored plenty of memories in there; we’ve buried feelings and emotions there.

How can we guard it with excellency?

God said to “Guard your heart above all else,” Why? “for it determines the course of your life.” – Proverbs 4:23 NLT

He doesn’t tell us to do anything we’re not able to do – with Him.

I believe our hearts are that hidden place where our spirit and soul come together; the place where God lives, if we let Him. Just as we have a triune God, we are triune beings. We ARE spirit, the part of us that is redeemed from the sin of the world; the part that joins into union with God Himself. We HAVE a soul (our mind, our will and our emotions) and we LIVE IN our body till we leave this world. When we come to Christ and invite Him to live in our heart, it involves submitting ourselves to Him completely. Many of us want God to save us from hell’s destruction after we leave this world but have absolutely no desire to become one with Him and submit the smallness of our humanity to the only all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent God.

Whether we know Jesus or not, we can guard our minds. We can be disciplined and hyper-vigilant about what we take in, at least for a while. We can stive to watch wholesome entertainment, we can study certain topics while deliberately avoiding others. We can limit who and what we surround ourselves with.  But plenty of garbage gets past us. We’d have to live alone on a deserted island to not get input from others. That’s not where we live.

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Whether we know Jesus or not, we can guard our bodies, though few of us have the discipline or perhaps resources to do so. Some are very determined to have healthy bodies. We do the best we can with what we have. But we all have unwelcome input that makes its way into our bodies, via our food or the air we breathe or the water we drink. To not get that input, we’d again have to live on that island and now it would have to be an island that could provide for healthy body requirements.

Only when we DO know Jesus are we supernaturally empowered to adequately guard our heart. That power comes from being united with the source of ALL power. By guarding our hearts, we become better equipped to guard our soul and our body.

The ONLY way to guard our heart is to follow biblical instruction, given to us in Romans 12:1-2 (NIV). “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

This means submitting ourselves to God, renewing our minds (spending time with God and His Word) and putting our hearts in His hands. Does doing this mean we will never suffer attacks? No, we’re promised attacks. But the more quality time we spend in His Word, the more easily we’ll recognize the assaults the god of this world and come against them. With God, we are the most excellent of the Guard.

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With God living on the inside of us and being joined together with us in the most intimate way possible, we can tap into His power. When we do OUR best, we weary ourselves. There’s so much to pay attention to around us. All our energy is consumed by constantly being on guard. We lose our creative energy and abilities to glorify God. By joining WITH GOD, we become capable of guarding our hearts, (where our being comes together), and doing it well. We are too weak to do it without Him and the struggle will make us weaker. The excellence of the Guard comes only through relationship with the God Who created our heart in the first place.

My Way?

Beginning again but we’ll try
something new
We should have started this way before.
In our hearts we know more than our minds can imagine
That’s why we attempt this once more.

In our hearts is a voice that says,
“Listen to Me.”
But our mind says, “I know what I’ll do!”
We start out again to arrange
things our way
In the end it’ll look misconstrued.

Everyone who will turn and will give
us the time
Can easily see what we’ve done
Perhaps not out loud,
but they’ll laugh when they see
For we’re right where we’d thought
we’d begun.

“Try again,” we’ll feel prompted and sigh
and sit down
And we’ll try it a new way today.
Once again in our hearts that ol’ tugging
we’ll feel
As God prompts us to do things His Way.

But our head tells us differently,
“Try it like this!”
And our heart tries so hard to chime in.
But it knows deep inside that this way
will not work
And we’re doomed to repeat it again.

So the struggle is getting our mind to obey
What we know in our hearts we should do.
For our mind says to do things the way
of our past
And our heart says,
“Let’s try out the new!”

In the past we were sinners so
lost in our way
But then Jesus came into our heart.
But we’re trapped in the ways that our minds used to think
Forgetting we get a new start.

So first we must stop and just listen to God
And determine what He has to say,
If we take time to pray about all that we do
We will hear when He tells us His Way.

The instructions He gives us may not
sound quite right
But that’s where our faith must come in.
If instead we turn back and search out
our own way
That’s not only dumb, it is sin!

So to add to the problems of doing our task
Planning out the right path we should take,
We drag in a bag that we can’t even see,
The conscience convictions we make.

Now the planning gets harder and harder
each time
And the grip of our sin just gets tighter,
If our minds would just stop and try
listening to God
We would find that the burden gets lighter.

But our mind is accustomed to being
in charge
And our hearts have to fight tooth and nail.
For our heart knows a joy it is dying to share
But our minds dig up fears that we’ll fail.

So we struggle with words like,
“Renewing our mind,”
And it tears us apart at the soul.
But the secret is simple,
our hearts know it well
~Give up and give Jesus control!
~Helen Williams! c 2002