Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. – Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)

Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. – Proverbs 4:23 (KJV)

52 Proverbs in 52 Weeks – Week 26
This week’s theme:  God’s Life Hacks

God’s Life Hack:  Guard your heart.

This week we start a new theme:  God’s Life Hacks.  If you’ve interacted with any form of social media you’ve probably come across many posts advocating various “Life Hacks,” which are simple tricks that can be applied to our day-to-day activities to increase productivity or efficiency.  Well, our Bible is filled with simple truths that, if applied to our day-to-day activities, will dramatically increase the fruitfulness and happiness of our lives.  Over the next several weeks we’ll highlight several of these simple truths from Proverbs, so we’ve decided to capture them under the theme of “God’s Life Hacks.”

Our first verse on this theme, Proverbs 4:23, offers us guidance and a simple truth.  The guidance:  we need to make protecting our hearts a top priority in our daily lives.  The simple truth:  what’s in our heart affects every single thing that we do.  Talk about the ultimate life hack–guarding our hearts affects every single aspect of our lives.

So, what does it mean to “guard your heart?”  To me, it means to fill our hearts and minds with Godly things and reject the things we know are not pleasing to Him.  Everything we see, hear, think, and do shapes our heart; it influences how we perceive and respond to the people around us and the situations we encounter from day to day.  A heart filled with God’s love, kindness, virtue, compassion, and wisdom lives a different, and more fruitful, life than a heart filled with hate, rudeness, immorality, selfishness, and foolishness.

And guarding our hearts is not easy to do today.  Everywhere we turn–music, TV, YouTube, the internet in general, some of our friends, etc.–we’re surrounded by opportunities to see, hear, and do things that fill our hearts with the wrong content.  That’s why it’s so important that we actively reject these temptations and make it a priority to fill our hearts with God’s goodness.
“…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” – Philippians 4:8 (NIV)
The first verse of our original 52 Week Challenge, Psalm 119:11, also speaks to this:
“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” – Psalm 119:11 (NIV)

The bottom line is this:  we must diligently guard our heart…absolutely everything we do “flows from it.”

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