HEART ATTITUDES / Importance of the Heart.
As a person who frequently drinks water straight from the tap, I was glad to read one day that Seattle has some of the best tap water in the country. Straight from the snow and rain runoff of the Cascades, our drinking water is kept safe in the Cedar River Watershed around North Bend.
The watershed is around 90,000 acres that are patrolled and monitored 24/7 to make sure the reservoir stays clean. Those going to such great lengths to keep the water pure do so because they know that 1.4 million people are depending on it. If the water can be kept pure at the source, it will flow out to all of those people purely as well. On the other hand, if it is contaminated, the pollution will not only affect the source, but spread throughout the city bringing potential for disease or health issues.
So, to say they put great effort into guarding that reservoir is an understatement.
In Proverbs 4:23, King Solomon, who was one of the wisest men to have ever lived said this:
23 Keep (or guard) your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
One thing that the authors of the Bible understood very clearly is that our hearts are the spring or the source from which everything else in our life flows.
And this is easy to see when we look at our physical bodies, isn’t it?
Life is in the blood and that blood is pumped throughout our bodies by the heart – so if there is no heart, there is no life. That is why heart surgery and issues with the heart are taken so seriously. As the heart goes, the body goes. When checking on someone to see if they are alive or dead what do they check for?
A pulse – a heartbeat.
The condition of the heart, although a small part of the body – effects it all. In the same way, the condition of our heart, spiritually, effects the overflow of our lives, which is why the author said to guard or keep it with ALL vigilance.
We have to protect it, to keep it pure, and watch what we are letting into it.
Several years ago, I was in a meeting in Oregon listening to a speaker talk about some new method or strategy for leading churches, but all I could hear during his talk was the phrase “heart posture.”
God kept bringing that to my mind, and as I began praying about it, I realized more and more how the posture of our heart effects the quality and intimacy of our relationship with God. I got this picture of the people in our church being spread out on the ground, totally laid out before God, with our hands humbly lifted to Him in praise. I was overwhelmed by the reality that if we could begin putting God on His rightful throne in our hearts, and ourselves in the right position to obey Him, there would be no limit to our intimacy with our Savior.
This thought is nothing profound. In fact, the Bible has several promises to those who come to God with a pure heart. In Matthew 5:8 Jesus said,
8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
If our hearts are pure, we will see or know God intimately. But not only that: a pure heart allows us to enter into his presence - Psalm 24:3-5 says:
3 Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
4 He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
who does not lift up his soul to what is false
and does not swear deceitfully.
5 He will receive blessing from the Lord
and righteousness from the God of his salvation.
We will see God and know him intimately, and we will be able to enter His presence and receive righteousness through salvation. But then also, Proverbs 3:5-6 says He will direct our paths:
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
6 In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
God promises some amazing things for those who keep their hearts pure. But the reality is, just as our hearts have the ability to pursue God and draw us closer to Him, they can also be used by the enemy to draw us away from Him.
Matthew 6:21:
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Jesus is saying that our hearts will be drawn to the things that we value or treasure the most. In Luke 6:45, the Bible also says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So what is inside our heart, whether good or bad, is going to eventually come out.
Psalm 14:1 says that a foolish heart will say there is no God.
Proverbs 16:5 says that an arrogant heart is an abomination to God.
Proverbs 18:2 says that a proud heart leads to destruction.
Now I know I just shot out a bunch of verses in a row. But I am sharing these with you to show that the Bible takes our hearts VERY seriously, and talks about them A LOT.
In fact, Kardia, which is the Hebrew word for heart, is referenced over 1,000 times in Scripture. The Biblical authors saw the heart as the seedbed of our emotions, desires, and our thoughts. And since they believed, as do we, that the Christian faith is about a relationship with Christ rather than just a list of rules, they knew that the heart was vitally important to that relationship.
But, like in any relationship, understanding our hearts can be tricky at times, as Jeremiah 17:9 says:
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
So, over the next ten or eleven weeks on the blog, we will be following along with Root’s Heart Attitude sermon series, looking at the ten indicators found in Scripture of a heart that is right with God. And our prayer is that as a church, these would go beyond a simple sermon and blog series and become a part of the culture and values that Roots holds.
We pray that as we grow in our maturity, both individually and as a church, we would be a people that when faced with an issue or temptation in life, would reflect on these heart attitudes and recognize where we might be going in the wrong direction.
We set these up as contrasting ideas to clearly illustrate a heart that is walking in intimacy with God, and a heart that is going away from Him.
So, when we are tempted to try and go through life alone, and avoid those whom God has put around us, through the grace of God, we would choose community over individualism.
Or when we start to get down about all of the tragic things we see in our world, we would choose hope over cynicism – recognizing the incredible hope we have in Christ.
That we would choose sacrifice over selfishness, and compassion over judgment, and on and on.
With these heart attitudes we hope to create awareness of which choices will bring you closer to God and which will pull you away from Him.
And in that, we also want to help point each other in the right direction as well. I hope you will join us!
Blessings,
Pastor Dave
If you want to dig deeper into this, need help, need prayer, or have questions—please reach out to us here: https://www.rootscc.com/covid-19-help