God wants you to trust your heart and be protected from harm

It has taken me many years in the faith to understand this truth.  I often saw it as a bad, judgemental spirit, but I no longer do.  I see it as God-given discernment.  And all who love God have it or can nurture it.

We may often think being innocent as doves is central to our job description as Christians, but how often do we also think seriously of being shrewd as serpents in the same way?  We all fear being labelled “judgemental”.

Proverbs 4:23 (NIV) says,

“Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.”

You may not have read those words before, “Above all else...”

The heart is, in Old Testament ancient terms, the absolute core of who we are.  As a committed peacemaker, I know how prone I am to housing idols in my heart.  We all do.  But if we guard our hearts, ensuring we confess and repent of idols as they crop up, everything that flows from us is potentially good and glorifying to God.

But like a good many things in life, we need to think in divergent terms.  In sports, for one example, we have offence and defence.  Prayer is two-way; us speaking with God, God speaking with us.

I want to suggest that, as far as our hearts are concerned, we need to guard our hearts, but we also need to trust our hearts.  Both these are highly important protective mechanisms.

Simply this:

When we guard our hearts,
we may prevent ourselves from sinning against others and God,
and when we trust our hearts,
we may prevent sin being done against us.

Yes, I know and accept that “the heart is deceptive,” but just as we operate by flesh or Spirit, we do have the capacity to discern what the Spirit of God is saying to us in the deeper reaches of our beings.

Don’t deny your heart, respect it, give it voice

On trusting our hearts, and the idea that God works through us in the discernment of truth and detection of falsehood through our hearts, I find that women especially must nurture this fundamental sense for self-protection purposes.  (I’m not saying men don’t need to do it, also.)

Where we get into some real trouble is when we hear our hearts scream, “No, there’s a real problem here,” and we tell our hearts, “No, quieten down, it will be okay.”  We may do this for one or a few of many reasons.

Perhaps we don’t want to disappoint someone or rock the boat.  Maybe we just think to ourselves, “Ah, there you go, overreacting again!” as we do a villagers-hate-a-boy-cries-wolf on ourselves.  It could be we’re scared of defending ourselves.  Perhaps we feel we’ll put a relationship at jeopardy if we’re assertive.

Some of our relationships are based on fear for what we might lose, especially those relationships we secretly feel we aren’t worthy of.  The relationships we feel safest in we don’t need to trust our heart, because our hearts are at ease.

Can I say it as plainly as this: we are doing God’s will to protect ourselves and the others we care about (our neighbours... everyone) when we trust our heart and seriously consider and do what it says.

Of course, it also needs to be said that we all need help in learning how to hear and therefore trust our hearts.  That takes wise advisors, it takes transparency, authenticity, vulnerability, humility, and it takes being accountable to God for our actions — that we do our actions in the fullness of God’s Presence.

Trusting your heart is no cure-all

We need to learn to listen to and trust our hearts.  But it’s no guarantee.  Indeed, by asserting ourselves when someone intends to sin against us, or actually does, we risk further harm.  But if we don’t assert ourselves, we don’t get to escape some certain scrapes.

Let me say it again:

Even if you trust your heart you may and will be sinned against anyway.  But it is important that you have your say when you are being transgressed, otherwise worse things may happen, and you never know what you might prevent just by being assertive.

~

Our key passions in life should compel us toward relational peace.  The world might rave about inner peace, but truly one sure way to inner peace is through relational peace.  And we’re all duty bound to make our own unrelenting contributions.

To this end, we need biblical peacemaking: for processes that help us resolve matters and reconcile relationships.  But because peacemaking doesn’t work in conflicts with recalcitrants, we need additional help and resources.  This is why I endeavour to provide for both.

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash