iThink...thereFore, iAm

Proverbs 4:23:
“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” (NIV)
“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” (ESV)
“Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.” (NLT)
“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it [are] the issues of life.” (KJV)

Very often I’ve read this verse thinking that I have to protect my heart from things because it is so precious. But you know what I really end up doing? I end up thinking that my heart is dark and deceitful (which isn’t really all that wrong) and I guard it as I would a dangerous prisoner - keeping it at bay, and putting a 24-hour shift of guards on it.  I have the feeling a lot of us do that in a milder form; we rule our lives with our heads (and we rule them very well indeed), but stuff of the heart is often misconstrued as being feeling, emotional, sentimental and all. Not many of these words carry positive connotation anymore - nowadays they have a negative slant to it, a derogatory tone when said, implying that those who “have a heart” in their lives are “too nice”, “too forgiving”, “not practical”, “not decisive”, “emo”, and so on. I’m not saying that we should all be depressed, but I’ll get to that in a while. Suffice to say, we keep the maximum possible distance from our hearts as we possibly can, and get along (rather well) living life.

Which really isn’t what this verse is trying to say isn’t it?

Now I’m sure we all know this intellectually - but I suspect that very very few of us live it out. I’m one of those who sometimes don’t - but this has awakened me. Why do we guard our heart? Because from it, brings life. How? I would like to think (though I don’t know if some may disagree) that the heart actually provides us one more connection to God. In fact, I personally feel that the heart is THE primary connection to God, but it also depends on what you define as the heart - so I’m going to leave it as that. :P

John Eldredge offers that we must work on the premise that our heart is good: created to be good, tainted by the fall, and then redeemed by the cross and resurrection. I have a struggle with that, because I find it hard to believe that the heart is intrinsically good. But I remember that God created Man, and blew life into him, and it was all “good” - and therefore the heart is also good, at least at the beginning, and then later redeemed. If we work on that premise, you’ll find all the reason you need to guard it jealously. We speak of saving our hearts for the one romance that will come our way, and girls swoon. We talk about finding our passion in life and directing efforts to it, and the guys charge with all their might to achieve the dreams. Whether you’ve done it or not, something resounds in you when I mention that. Male or female, our natural inclination is our heart, and we’ve tempered it with our head, sometimes overruled it and sometimes rightly so.  To guard a dangerous prisoner is very different from guarding a treasure you own - the way we treat it is different, and so many of us treat our hearts with contempt. Especially guys, because society has taught some of us that if you wanna be a MAN you gotta bang as many girls as you can without regard to their wellbeing and the emotions that they might feel, and make cold, hard decisions without struggling with them. I think I see more “man” in a person who might make the same decisions in the end, but struggle with having to make cold hard decisions because he knows and feels the effects that will ripple out from it. This behaviour has gotten many men far in where they are, but I wonder how their personal lives are affected. Sadly, more and more women are picking up on this, and they’re taking the same behavioural traits - sociological studies have been done and these are simply the findings I’m reiterating to you.

(I know I’m being very crude and direct, but I couldn’t phrase it any other way :P)

Back to the heart - so we protect it, yes?

No, we don’t. We expose it to cruelty, pornography, idealism, etc. Things that don’t really do any good for it. People who know me know that I prefer honesty to decorum, and thus won’t blink an eye when other people swear openly. Should I be? I don’t know - this is just how I love the people who care enough to be honest with me, and this is my personal view and you don’t have to agree or practice it :) How then should we guard our hearts? Well - how do you guard your wife/husband? JEALOUSLY, right? You don’t let him or her into situations where the relationship would be threatened, and you vehemently disagree when something rings an alarm in your head (or heart), and even have arguments about it. How would you guard a treasure? With great passion and vigilance I would suppose!

Is that the same way we guard our heart - do we just chuck it in a locked room and throw away the key without ever looking back, or do we prevent it from entering places it should not go? Do we put good things in its path so that it doesn’t get distracted from God? Putting failsafes and guards to watch over it so that nothing can steal it without our permission? Do we even have the wisdom to discern what we should let in and what we should not? Wrestling with it when it conflicts with our heads so that we find out why and get to the bottom of the matter internally in order to refine it further and cultivate it to be stronger? Do we remind it of the beauty that God has infused into this world, and feed it with that same beauty that it craves?

The scientist in me now questions the philosopher - how then do we do so? Giving our heart away to things, to people has become second nature to us; how are we to guard it? Practical aspects include having someone to be accountable to, avoiding situations where you will be tempted to let something of the old flesh (which, by the way, is supposed to be dead) slip back in, and so on. But the best way I’ve been inspired to guard our hearts is a quote I read on dating in a Christian context, spoken as advice to the sisters out there.

“Let your heart be so deeply in God that a man has to seek God to find it.”

The best place way to guard our hearts is to entrust them into God’s hands and seek Him with everything we have. And by “everything we have” I mean with the same passion, discipline and determination you have to “live it up”, “win the medal”, “get that promotion”, “impress that girl”, “earn the degree”, “clinch the deal”, “score the job”, and so on. You’ll notice that we seem to put a lot of effort into these things, but only barely enough into God so that we still have a connection that we can run back to when we’re in trouble. I know I’m guilty of all of that - where do you think all the examples before that came from?

I know it will take sacrifices and we will need mercy. I know it will be hard and we will need strength. I know we will fail and we will need forgiveness, especially from ourselves because we are so hard on ourselves at times. But I also know where all these can be obtained.

Why not start by looking to the One for all that?

After all, if it’s your heart you’re concerned about - He created it.

I’m going to start a series in which i will (attempt) to dig deeper into some of the words or jargon we commonly use in worship or in church, and delve into the deeper meaning of it, as much as i can. More often than not this will be something that strikes me as most of us not really going deep enough into what we say and just repeating it as it comes.  I think some of these things have implications into the way we live life and so on, and i’d like to point them out, as much as they will be my opinions and perspectives and people are free to disagree with them. :) I’ll try to come up with something like this ever so often, perhaps once a week, but sooner or later i’m going to run out of ideas so if anyone has any input or something you’d like to hear a take on i’d be more than glad to give it a shot.

And so the first victim is going to be the phrase “alpha and omega”. haha.

We often say this of God, that He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end. We know that God started before the beginning of time, and He will last till beyond eternity - it is even accurately said that He was before time began and He will be the one to will time to end. But i somehow think there is a deeper meaning to this that simply the symbolism of the Greek alphabet.

“Alpha” and “Omega” are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet - symbolic of the eternal nature of God. The direct reference can be found in Revelations 1:8, 21:6 and 22:13. The reiteration of “the first and last”, “the beginning and end”, and He who “was and is and is to come” implies that God existed before everything and will continue to exist after all has come to an end - the Uncreated Creator, as John White phrased it, who existed before creation (and had a part to play in it) and will continue to exist after all that is created has come to pass.

Perhaps most of us understand this part - that God is eternal. What we maybe never thought about is what that implies to us, which kind of only struck me today. OK maybe i’m slow and you guys have all figured this out long before i did. But i’m going to put this here anyway.

Consider this: if you knew something or someone would last way beyond you, would you invest more or less time/effort in it? If something has such value that it was eternal, or that it was eternal and therefore had that kind of intrinsic value, how would you react to it? This is something i was led to think about as i considered the concept of “Alpha and Omega”. It occurred that He is not just the Alpha and Omega, He wants to be my Alpha and Omega.

I am reminded of my solitary general purpose - “the chief purpose of Man is to worship God” - and everything that i do stems from that. It will start with Him, it will end when He bids my life to end, and everything in between needs to stem from that focus. Can i have other things other than worship in song in church? Can i do things outside church? I think by all means - worship is not limited in our outward expression, and in fact the most important form of worship (i feel) occurs inside us. It is easy (or at least easier) to follow a set of rules and methods and procedures to help us go through the motions and carry out the necessary actions - but all that achieves, whether we intend it that way or not, is that it forms a set of habits and actions that portray that you seem to have that perspective in life.

I realize i’m treading on thin ice here - so let me clarify that i fully believe that we are to live out our faith and the outward expression is good and very much encouraged! I don’t think we can claim to love God and put Him first and yet not have it show in our lives - what i’m saying here is that it is possible to package things nicely to make it look like we have that perspective.  It’s also possible to fool everyone around us doing so. At this point i have this inkling that in such a facade there will be holes that can be detected if looked at and if we are honest enough with ourselves - some of them others will see, some only we see and we can choose to hide it (which i have often done) or deal with it (which i am forced to do more and more frequently). How do i know about the facade and about how we react to it? Simple: i did that for a time, until i started taking these things seriously.

That being said i feel that the outward expression comes from a natural inflow of what’s in the heart - i think it’s impossible to be perfect and we all fall from time to time, even with an eternal perspective, but it’s also hard to maintain a full faultless facade from all angles; there are bound to be some spots noticed. Very often one can tell when the heart of the person is pure or if they are just trying to keep things looking good. It becomes more evident when the trouble starts coming in - whether the Alpha and Omega is really the be all and end all of the person’s life becomes evident.

I don’t deny that even with this as the focus there are still lingering bits of things that we want to do with our lives here, and i’m trying to understand and reconcile the two together (hopefully) soon. I still wonder what it means.

Is He really your α and Ω? Is He mine?