Skylar's Blog & Podcast

There is a book in the Bible written mostly for young men, but there are most definitely principles in this book that can be applied to women. The book of Proverbs is a collection of wisdom writings to the young men of the day, and at then end of Chapter 4 the writer starts laying out all these pieces of advice one after the other. He writes things like, "Put away perversity from your mouth...Fix your gaze directly before you...Do not swerve to the left or the right." However, before any of this the write says this: "Above all else..." It sounds like what he's about to write is going to be VERY important, and he says this:

Above all else, guard your heart,

for it is the wellspring of life.

Proverbs 4:23

We talked yesterday about being patient with love, and one of the reasons was because if we just jump into love without really counting the cost then we could be setting ourselves up to be broken pretty badly. The question now is: why is protecting our heart so important? The writer makes this clear, "...for it is the wellspring of life." Well, that makes the heart sound pretty important...but what does that mean? First you need to understand the writer is not speaking about our actual hearts. In Jewish culture the heart symbolizes the sum total of person's emotions, soul, and spirituality. In other words, the heart symbolizes everything about us: our personality, our tendencies, our likes and dislikes, who and what we love...EVERYTHING. Out of the heart flows what we commit too, what we invest in, who we invest in, and if we don't protect that we will probably end up hurt and broken. The writer of the Proverbs and God know how deeply we are affected by the things we give our heart too, and because of that we are asked to guard it. We are asked to not give it away freely but to prayerfully and patiently offer to those people and things that deserve it.