1. The Heart Described
Proverbs 4:23 gives us this warning: “Guard your heart above all else” Now that’s a pretty drastic command. Guard your heart above all else; above all else. That word, “guard” means to protect or maintain. The KJV word is “keep” like a guard that keeps watch over a gate or a door. There must be something pretty special about the heart that makes it so valuable that it must be protected above everything else in life. What could it be? Well, the answer is found in the last part of that verse. “Because it is the source of life.” KJV says, “out of it are the issues of life.” NAS translates it, “from it flow the springs of life.” That word translated “springs,” or “issues,” or “source” literally means “boundaries.” Other translations of the word are border, going forth or going out, outgoing. In other words, what bubbles out of your heart literally sets the perimeters for your life. Think about that: how well you guard or don’t guard your heart, that is what you let in and out of your heart determines where the boundaries of your life are.
David who was described as “a man after God’s own heart,” said in Psalm 64:6, “The inner man and the heart are mysterious.” And the prophet Jeremiah declared, “The heart is more deceitful than anything else and desperately sick—who can understand it?” The answer is we cannot without the Spirit of God shining the light of God’s Word on every dark area. Look at the next verses: “I, the Lord, examine the mind, I test the heart to give to each according to his way, according to what his actions deserve.” (Jeremiah 17:9-10) Now there are two things we know about the heart: 1) God alone knows every human heart (I Kings 8:39) and 2) God alone crafts the heart. (Psalm 33:15) Now you may read that statement and think, “What’s the use in even talking about all this? My heart must be just what God crafted it to be.” But what that really says to us is: “If my heart is going to be made right, I must give it to Him because He is the only one who can fix it.” So knowing He’s the One who crafted the heart in the first place, and considering that Scripture teaches us that we’ve been made in His image, let’s take a few moments to look at His heart.
THE HEART OF GOD
When Moses asked God to show him His glory, what he was asking was for God to show him His value, His worth. The word glory has the idea of being weighty like on a scale—the more weight, the more glory. What Moses was asking was for God to show him His value or His worth. In other words he was saying, “Show me Your heart. Show me Who you are in Your inner most being.” We find His declaration of Himself recorded in Exodus 34:6-7 “Yahweh—Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation.” Look at the words God used to describe Himself: compassionate, gracious, faithful love and truth, forgiving—all words which cannot be manifested in action without the accompanying emotion in the heart. So God was revealing His heart to Moses.
In this revelation we see two distinct and distinguishing characteristics of the heart of God. 1) God is love (manifested by mercy)—Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love… forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. And 2) God is holy (manifested by justice)—But He will not leave the guilty unpunished… We find both of these qualities affirmed over and over in Scripture, both directly and indirectly. I John 4:16 plainly states, “God is love.” In fact, Jesus declared love as the greatest commandment. First, love for God and second, love for others. Over and over in the N.T. we find love is the pinnacle of the Christian experience. And it was God’s great love that moved Him to create mankind in the first place. He had no one to give His love to—no one with a heart like His that had the capacity to give and receive love. Think of it, God was surrounded by angels and other heavenly beings He had created, but in eternity past God had created no one to share His heart with. So He created man in His own image. You see God doesn’t just love us because He created us, but He created us solely to be the object of His love and affection.
The other great characteristic of God’s heart portrayed in this passage is the characteristic of holiness. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished… Holiness is purity. That means He’s unstained by the guilt of anything. That’s why the writer of Hebrews warns us that without holiness no one will see the Lord. Over and over in the book of Leviticus God says, “Be holy, because I am holy.” So, if we are to connect with God it must be from a heart that is holy. Now when we place our trust in Christ for our eternal salvation, we receive the righteousness of Christ. We are made holy and righteous in the sight of God because when He looks at us He sees the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us. The righteousness of Christ establishes a connection, a relationship to God on the basis of holiness. But if we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, we also have a responsibility to be holy; otherwise He wouldn’t have issued the command, “Be holy, because I am holy.”
Think of it this way: The Bible uses linen as a picture of righteousness. Think of your heart as a piece of cloth. Before you were saved it was moth-eaten, rotting, and filthy. (Isaiah 64:6) That’s how God describes our inherent righteousness. In other words, we have none. But when Christ saves us, our cloth is replaced with the linen of Christ’s righteousness. Now the linen is clean and pure and immune to decay—kind of like scotch guarding. Nothing can eat through it. But when we allow ourselves to be spotted by the world, it’s like dropping something on your linen that makes it dirty. Because the linen is protected the stain cannot soak through and rot the cloth, but it sits on the surface hiding the beauty of the cloth—hiding the fact that the cloth is linen. We must be cleansed if the beauty of the linen is to be seen. Even so, when we allow ourselves to be spotted by the world, our righteousness is hidden from the world. We must be cleansed for the beauty of the righteousness of Christ to be seen by the world.
One of my favorite names for God is Jehovah M’Kaddesh. It means “the God who purifies.” Malachi 3:2-3 says the Messiah will be like a refiner’s fire and like cleansing lye. “He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” Gold and silver are purified by a process of putting them in the fire then scraping off the dross, then putting them back into the fire then scraping off the dross, over and over until what is left is 100% pure. And that’s what God does with us. The writer of Hebrews says, “Our God is a consuming fire.” [Hebrews 12:29] What does that mean except that the fire of His holiness consumes all that is impure within us conforming us to the image of Christ.
So we see these two great character qualities in the heart of God: that of love and that of holiness.
THE HEART OF MAN
Of course, man was created in a state of innocence with the capacity to love and be holy. Because the man and the woman were created in God’s image (the only creatures to be so), they was given the ability to rationalize, to feel and to choose, as well as the ability to communicate those thoughts, feelings and choices. Let’s look at these God-given abilities that uniquely make each of us who we are—that hidden person of the heart.
In the illustration that follows it’s important to realize each of these parts work together, not independently. So my goal here is not to compartmentalize the heart. You cannot isolate the working of one part of the heart from the other because all the parts were made to function together. But I think you will be better equipped to examine yourselves by analyzing the working of each part.
Think about man. He has eyes to observe and ears to perceive external information. He has a mind to process what he sees and hears. He has emotion to feel joy or pain, depending on what he sees and hears and how it’s processed in the mind. He has a mouth to communicate what he’s seen & heard, and what he thinks and feels. He has hands so he can do things, and feet so he can go places. In all he’s a pretty incredible creation. But there’s something else about man that sets him apart from other creations. He has the ability to make choices—choices that can be based on how he thinks and how he feels. Now the admonition of Solomon’s warning is becoming a little clearer. If choices are made according to thoughts and feelings, our thoughts and feelings must be guarded from outside influences that would lead us to make wrong decisions, because our choices and decisions affect not only our lives, but the lives of those we influence.
But still there’s something deep in the heart of man working with his thoughts and emotions that affects the choices he makes and that is his “will” or as I prefer to think of it, “desire.” The Old Testament word for desire means “to incline to”. It’s the picture of a plant that bends to find the sunlight. Desire is what drives all of us. It influences the way we process what we see and hear and in turn what we think and feel. Sometimes desire develops from our own rebellion and waywardness. Sometimes it develops from our wounds and the resulting lies we’ve believed. Sometimes we have conflicting desires. However our desire, once formed, becomes our driving passion. Desire is what motivates us and in turn sets the course for our lives. Desire is the place that only the love of Christ can satisfy, but because of our sinful nature our desire has become distorted and complex instead of simple and pure as it was intended to be. If we let it, that desire will drive us closer to the Father until we can look at Him face to face and say, “Beside You there is nothing I desire on earth.” (Psalm 73:25) If there’s anything in us that wants to please the heart of God, anything that longs and thirsts for God, it will be manifested in our desire. By the same token, there’s no place in the heart more prone to self exaltation than desire. And somewhere in the inner man the conscience comes into play—one’s own sense of right conduct.
Perception is the point at which our desire intersects with our cognitive reasoning to interpret the external information that we receive. That’s why two people can witness the same event and interpret it completely different. The interpretation is a result of the inclination of their hearts. We see this all the time in the news media. Headlines, polls, commentators all with their own spin to the story. And they all seem to so sincerely believe their chosen positions because their understanding of events is based not only on their observations, but according to the inclination of their hearts—according to their own agenda which has affected the way they think about what they have observed.
Not only wrapped up in the heart of man is there the issue of thinking and feeling, of the will and desire, and how perception is formed, there’s the issue of behavior. Behavior is how we conduct ourselves in words and deeds; in other words, behavior is what we say and do. Now Jesus had a lot to say about behavior. His words recorded in Matthew 12:34 say, “For the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.” He goes on to say “by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” Why would that be? Well, because the words you speak come from what is flowing out of your heart. Your words are an expression of the condition of your heart. Jesus said, “For what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a man. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies. These are the things that defile a man…” (Matthew 15:18-20) So we see that the desires of the heart have a direct affect on how we think and feel, and what we do and say. Our behavior is determined by the desires of our hearts in conjunction with what our conscience will allow.
So if we are to have a pure heart, one that’s unspotted by the influences of the world, our desire must be surrendered to the desire of Christ. It must be aligned with God’s heart, with God’s purpose—love and holiness. Accepting Christ as Savior was just the first step toward that alignment. At salvation you had to acknowledge Jesus as the only way of salvation, giving up your own thoughts and feelings about what it takes to be saved. You had to agree with God about your sin and confess in humility the Lordship of Jesus Christ in your life. However, every desire of your heart was not necessarily surrendered at that point, but a process began. And the mind had not been renewed, but a process began. God is in the process of conquering your heart little by little, one desire at a time, until there is one supreme burning desire in your heart for Him.
Remember how the children of Israel were to conquer the land. God had promised it to them, but they still had to go in and take possession of it, and that took years. You might ask, “Does that mean I’m really working for my salvation?” Not at all! It’s a work we cannot do without the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s the “working out,” that is the visible manifestation of the inward invisible working of Christ. It’s the process of being conformed to the image of Christ. So if we want to change our behavior and change our perceptions, our desire must be changed. And before that happens we must recognize our desires; what it is we incline towards; what motivates us.