My son, pay attention to what I say;

turn your ear to my words.

Do not let them out of your sight,

keep them within your heart;

for they are life to those who find them

and health to one’s whole body.

Above all else, guard your heart,

for everything you do flows from it.

Keep your mouth free of perversity;

keep corrupt talk far from your lips.

Let your eyes look straight ahead;

fix your gaze directly before you.

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet

and be steadfast in all your ways.

Do not turn to the right or the left;

keep your foot from evil.

-Proverbs 4:20-27

Keep your focus on verse 23. ABOVE ALL ELSE GUARD YOUR HEART; FOR EVERYTHING FLOWS FROM IT. KJV says “for out of it are the issues of life.” Oh man, isn’t that right. NIV says “the well spring of life”. Everything that touches your life or my life is getting sprayed or splashed by the fountain of your heart. Everything we are doing is being sprayed constantly by our hearts. Think about it this way- if I have a cold heart, I am spraying ice cold water all over everything around. If I have a bitter heart I am spraying bitterness and poison all over everyone around me. If I have a joyful or happy heart, I am splashing joy on everything around me. Our hearts are a wellspring of life! Everything bursts from it! We may think that we are withholding things, but no we are not! If I am withholding warmth, then I am spraying out coldness! Are you following me here? If I have all my doubt and my confusion and my fear and insecurity, then that is what I am spraying! Our hearts never run dry! What a revelation for me this has been! Luke makes it clear that “from the overflow of our heart, the mouth speaks.” So we cant even say a word without our heart getting into it! Even if we lied, our lying heart was all over what we said! So what then, does it mean, to GUARD OUR HEARTS? I am getting to that! God’s goodness and His glory are inseparable! You’re never going to live to the glory of God that you wont see the goodness of God! Ok so look how amazing our God is! In Exodus chapter 34 God and Moses are having a conversation! Starting from verse 5 check this out: “Now the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, He maintains His love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.” Remember Proverbs 4:23? Guard our hearts? Protect our hearts? If we want to know what it means to guard our hearts, lets see in action God guarding His heart. Verse 7 in Exodus 34 says that God maintains His love! God’s idea of guarding His heart is to guard Himself against diminishing love. He guards his love! When you and I think about guarding our hearts we think about guarding our hearts FROM people. God guards His heart FOR people. How AMAZING! He protects His love for you! He constantly keeps it in view. Now I will be transparent, this has been SUCH a difficult concept for me to grasp because I don’t know about you but I am the type of person that when I go through a tough time where I have reaped what I have sown, I begin to think that God has completely frozen his love for me. I make up in my mind that he has totally biased His love for me. BUT LISTEN TO THIS: at no time ever is God unbiased about you. He never sets his love for you aside. Our idea of guarding our hearts is guarding against. Paul writes in Philippians 1:9-10 “And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” He is saying “I want you to love more and more, but not blindly. I want you to know your situation so you can be freed up in your life”. You and I do not want to suffer diminishing love. We want our love to overflow! But with wisdom and discernment. What he has really pressed on my heart lately is that the big priority we have would not be with what we are protecting our hearts against but what we are protecting our hearts for! Because what the scripture is talking about is that he guards himself against any diminishing love! He guarded His heart so that it would constantly overflow with an abounding type of love so that when a sinner bends his knees and repents He can look on him with love. Is that how we are guarding our hearts lately? I pray that this would be my daily goal: to choose to guard my heart FOR Him!

this is so interesting and relevant right now!

taken from Oswald Chambers' devotional: "My Utmost for His Highest"

When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.

-Mark 4:10

His Solitude with Us. When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted desires, a broken friendship, or a new friendship— when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us. Notice Jesus Christ’s training of the Twelve. It was the disciples, not the crowd outside, who were confused. His disciples constantly asked Him questions, and He constantly explained things to them, but they didn’t understand until after they received the Holy Spirit (see John 14:26).

As you journey with God, the only thing He intends to be clear is the way He deals with your soul. The sorrows and difficulties in the lives of others will be absolutely confusing to you. We think we understand another person’s struggle until God reveals the same shortcomings in our lives. There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone. Are we alone with Him now? Or are we more concerned with our own ideas, friendships, and cares for our bodies? Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with Him.

Words are so powerful aren’t they? Good or bad. We often find ourselves replaying over and over again certain things that people have said to us or things that we have said to people. In fact some of the very things we have not forgiven people for are words that they have said to us. Words have such power over us. Power so much that at the time they may sound good, but later after we replay them in our minds we start questioning whether they line up with God’s word or not. Proverbs 18:20 states, “From the fruit of their mouth a person’s stomach is filled; with the harvest of their lips they are satisfied.” Our lips…what comes from our mouths is having a harvest. Is it having the harvest we want it to? Our words have power but what type of power are they having over our lives? Verse 21 goes onto say “the tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” Basically- we will eat our own words! They could be sweet and lovely! We are going to eat the fruit of our own words. As for the tongue: our tongues have power, metaphorically speaking, of life and death.

God’s words are omnipotent and man’s words (my words and your words) are potent. Why? Because we are created in the image of God. God is spirit and He gave us a spirit… we are the ultimate image bearers. The power to use words is such an attribute of divine image bearing! God wants to use our mouths so that He is glorified and people are edified! Do our words have Godly potency? The word of God tells us that God literally spoke the universe into existence. It happened as a command…He opened his mouth and from absolutely nothing the universe came into existence. The Message says it as “He spoke the word and there they were.” How cool is it that He has full creative power in His words?! Hebrews 1:3 says that “the Son is the radiance of Gods glory and the exact representation of His being sustaining all things by His powerful word.” That means, when He went let there be light… it stays until He tells it not to! THAT is some power. You see… God can only be Holy. One of the most important things that we can ever get through our heads is this: GOD HAS NOT MESSED UP. God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all! He can’t get in a bad mood and use ugly words with you. Spotless integrity and spotless Holiness. We as His image bearers have the invitation to say what is right! But we also have to deal with the devil and our fleshiness and our sinful man. What a mess. Do this for a minute... think about the part words play in temptation and participation. In all relational sin (any sin that takes two or more), the connector between temptation and participation is conversation. Everybody’s got temptation. Temptation is not sin! It’s when temptation begins to be meditated on and turns into participation. What is the connector? Conversation. It will start in the mind, it will go to the mouth and then it goes to the body. We have to nip it in the butt when it comes to the mind. If we don’t, then it will start coming out of the mouth and so on and so forth.

John 6:63 states “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” If we are invaded and empowered by His holy spirit, we can be used by God through the power of His holy spirit dwelling in us to speak words that are spirit and life. HOWEVER! Before we do this, we need to let God heal us of wounds that people’s words have had over us. Words that have been said to us in the past still effect us, don’t they? There is a famous saying “wounded people wound people” “hurting people hurt people”. We need to lash out words that have come from cold and mean spirited people. James 1:19 “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry,” Why? Quick anger brings quick angry words. Think about the things that have slipped out of your mouth to somebody else. My greater regrets are some of the things that have come out of my mouth. I bet you remember the words of your first breakup. I bet you remember when a teacher said something to you in front of the class. I bet you remember when your parents expressed their lack of trust in you. Words can burn holes in our minds.

Only words can cancel out words. AND only omnipotent words can cancel out potent words. Gods words can heal the words that have caused us so much human pain. Isaiah 54:17 states “no weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from me,” declares the Lord” The word of God also tells us in Revelation 12:10 that as new testament believers in Jesus Christ that Satan is our accuser and accusations take place in words. You have the will power to refute every single tongue that the accuser can point at you. Luke 6:28 says “Bless those who curse you.” Use words to fight back!! When we have been hurt by words, it takes words to heal. When people hurt us we need to pray for them. God can use the words from our mouths and our hearts to bring healing to us. We need to pray that they will be restored and healed from the mean words and things that they have done. Isn’t that hard to do!? The very thing that hurt us can heal us. God wants us to open our hearts and mouths to pray that the person who cursed us would be blessed. God teaches us lessons through this! How ironic and yet how marvelous that He would at times use words He puts in our own mouth to heal us from what has come out of someone else’s. THAT has potency, would you agree?