"Guard Your Heart"

So many times growing up…and even in the last few years, people always say “guard your heart.” At some points, I have recognized the need for the “guarding of the heart.” It is a popular thing for people to say in Christianity-or at least the Christianity I have "seen" the last 17 years. I have even heard it told to a young woman, who just having been used and abused by a man, that if only she had “guarded her heart” she would not have been going through that tough time. It made me angry to hear that at that time. My friend probably did think about that in the process but the last thing she really needed to hear at her lowest point was that she should have guarded her heart. Of course, if she is a professing Christian she realized that already. Just stick a helping hand out or a shoulder to cry on-don’t lecture about something that you do not even understand. If that person knew what it really meant to “guard one’s heart” she would have helped the young woman guard her own.

Don’t worry or check out on me. I am getting to something so just bare with my antics. A few years ago, my mother kept telling me “guard your heart,” “guard your heart,” “guard your heart, it is going to hurt if you give too much of your heart away and you don’t get the same thing in return.” Well, while I completely understood the “Christian” motherly rationale behind this statement, guarding my heart became an overwhelming task. It resulted in not easily trusting other people because I thought that if I were to “guard my heart” it meant never letting anyone close to the intricate person God has made me to be. Not to say that I did not have lasting deep relationships at the time that I began to think this way, but I know that other people missed out on me in their lives-and I missed out on having them. This was either because I pushed them away, or I thought they had to earn my trust…I initially thought (with some people not all) that they were only going to break my heart so they had to earn the trust so that we could pursue a deeper relationship.

Now, when people say, just “guard your heart” Jess. I say-What exactly do you mean by that? Like….what does that even mean-can you tell me? Are you telling me to be careful or cautious with giving part of my heart away? Are you telling me to stay away from people and not let them get close to me at all? What exactly does “guarding your heart” mean to you? What most people seem to be saying is just “be careful.” Okay that is great. Thank you, but I would deem that “guarding my heart” is a bit deeper than that-At least from a Christian perspective.

First we should probably understand what our heart is. It is a center piece of who God has made us to be. It is the intimate part of a person, that which goes pitter patter for the one we love or our God-it is the same part that commits to the Lord. The heart, being something most precious and valuable that God’s word says this:
20 My son, pay attention to what I say; listen closely to my words. 21 Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart; 22 for they are life to those who find them and health to a man's whole body. 23 Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Proverbs 4:20-23

The Scriptures use the word “heart” so many times. Just use a search engine or a concordance to look it up. You will see what I mean. We should guard our hearts from evil, from foul speech, from jealousy, from provoking others, from hatred, from this or that-all of these things can be found in the Bible…in commands and teachings about how we live the Christian life. In order to protect from these things we have to be equipped. We read Scripture, pray, and surround ourselves with those that are uplifting in spirit.

Philippians 4 says that if we are not anxious and pray then the peace of God that goes beyond all understanding will “guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

We should also guard our hearts, keep the heart safe, from those in our lives that only want to take and take and take; or from becoming overly emotionally attached to someone when we shouldn’t; or from trying to get fulfillment in things that are only temporary. I don’t know about you but as I list the many things we should guard our hearts against, it becomes exhausting and for me overwhelming-how can one guard themselves from all of these things intentionally? Is there a certain prayer or certain actions that we should take in order to do this?

While I believe that prayer and seeking God on a daily basis helps-it is the sure way of being in tune with God and His Spirit. I do know what doesn’t help. I learned that “guarding my heart” did not mean never letting anyone get close to me ever. It is not about making people earn a place in my life (which I think we do so often, especially at the Christian institution in which I work and attend school). Granted, we do not want to just let anyone into our personal lives, but we don’t want to end up not doing that either. I have felt recently that I have to prove myself to someone over and over again just to make them see that I am not like seemingly majority of people that have seemed to be stereotyped. But then I realized that I am not living for this person. I am living for me. And Christ in me proves true over and over again. The Holy Spirit leads and guards my heart so that I do not go astray. “Guarding my heart” does not mean not taking risks on being close to people-though for several months that is how I felt and I think that many of you feel the same way.

You can guard your heart and honor God and still get to know people on an intimate level; by intimate I mean the inner being of who the person is-their hearts. And if for some reason they “break your heart” well, you know who to turn to for healing. Now as far as all of the other things that you should be “guarding your heart” against-run from those-the sin…jet in the other direction…there is only death and destruction waiting when we do not guard against the things and people who are out to distract us from the purpose God has. To know Him and to make Him known. What a beautiful thing. “Guard your heart” and don’t allow it to be tainted by the things of this world. “Guard your heart” against cynicism-no one is perfect, but at least pray and seek God about how to “guard your heart’ in response to those around you. Some people, they don’t need to know all of your business; hey, probably most people do not need to know-but there are those that you and I may be keeping at an arm’s length that maybe if you let down some of the guardedness, there would be a bit of blessing on its way.

So, we should “guard our hearts” against the things of this world, against the lies, deceit, evil, lust, jealousy, envy, greed, etc. that the world would tell us we have a right to. We should “guard our hearts” enough so that we do not invest so much of ourselves into another person apart from God, that we are left feeling empty and broken. We should “guard our hearts” against our own flesh and thoughts that do not coincide with what God is saying.

We should render ourselves, our thoughts, and our hearts to the Lord Jesus-if we let Him lead and guide us, then “guarding our hearts” won’t be a mystery anymore. It won’t be complicated or misunderstood. The next time someone says to me “Jess are you guarding your heart?” or “Jess guard your heart” I think I will still as what that means-because I do not want to be one of those people that is so guarded due to the fear of being hurt or rejected that my life has no risks. Be wise, be rational, be filled with God’s Spirit to make appropriate decisions about “guarding your heart” but by all means do not just “guard your heart” for fear of receiving a broken one. Let the commitment run deeper than that. Render your heart to the One who saves, gives life, gives peace, gives precious joy.

Be totally, completely, unreserved with the love you have for Jesus Christ.

This might hurt a little...at least for me.

This might hurt a little…at least for me.
I do not know about the rest of you, but I am sick of learning lessons the hard way! You know, when we are stubborn and think that we can do things our own way and get away with it..then it blows up in our faces. Maybe you have experienced this. Maybe it hasn’t happened to you yet! Personally, I wish I weren’t so stubborn that God has to teach and then re-teach me a lesson so that my heart actually receives the discipline. I guess I should be thanking him for his mercy and the gift of second chances.


Warning: Some of you men might find this a little too “heart” felt or mushy…you are sick of this love stuff…well, stop whining please and just keep reading. Jesus was the ultimate man…and He had no problem talking about love and demonstrating love…He showed us the ultimate sacrifice of one’s love for another by dying for us.


 God is a jealous God. This does NOT mean he is jealous of you. Why would He be? He created you and He did not make a piece of junk. You are an intricately crafted piece of art created by the most creative artist ever (Read Pslam 139). It means He is jealous for you; for your affection, for your attention. He does not want you to worship or love anything above Him (Read 2 Corinthians). This is emptiness anyway. For me, this means that He loves me so much and wants to have a relationship with me so much that if anything stands in the way of His heart and my heart connecting, He is going to weed it out. He is going to go in there and dig that joker out of my heart (whatever that “joker” might be). Now, don’t get me wrong, God is a gentleman…even to you men reading this. He knocks and waits for us to open the door; He gives us a chance to rend our own hearts, but He definitely knows how to discipline us and teach us lessons, even if it means breaking us a little bit…or a lot, depending on how thick your skull is. Ha.


A few years ago I had to learn a lesson that was very painful…well it was probably a few lessons in one life experience, but the main one was learning that I do NOT have nor do I need control over my life. What a mess I would make it anyway. I only think I know what is best for me until God compares what I desire as best to His actual best…then what I wanted seems like smelly trash.


The second one was that the relationships I have with people cannot get in the way of the relationship I have with God, my first true love. I may get closer to some people than others and I may feel the compelled to lavish a little more “love” on some than I do others, but this is usually because God is teaching me or that other person a lesson. I have found that those that God has me pour into the hardest and the fastest are those that are not meant to be in my life but for a season. This hurts but it is so worth every minute, every tear, and every piece of myself that I give away. (I still hope for the few more in my life that get to stay a lifetime.)


I believe that God does NOT make mistakes and He knows the people that need to be put in my path. Sometimes, however, He has to rip people out of my path for me to learn, mature, and grow closer to Him.


You see-my heart in and of itself is a smelly, rotten, stained, shattered, decaying place that no one would ever want to enter. But with God, my heart is pure, holy, complete, and steadfast; the inside of who I am has been transformed from a darkened dungeon full of dreadful dragons into a beautifully lit palace. Now, don’t get me wrong here. I am not perfect yet, but when I allow God to clean out the wounds I allow Him to give me more space to love Him and to love others.


You still don’t get it?
Let me give you another visual that one of my professors gave me…if you have ever seen or been around burn victims you know that they must have their burns scraped and cleaned out often in order for healing to occur. Despite the pain that they are in, the doctor must scrape and dig out the rotting flesh in order for new skin to grow. Now I don’t know if you can imagine that but it hurts me to the core just thinking about it. While this is a painful process for the burn victim, the doctor knows that the pain he is causing right now can save that person’s body and help them to heal properly as time goes by.


Well, this is what God does, he scrapes out the crap (I know, this word is so lady like) that has managed to clog up your life and your heart, and it hurts like crazy. But He knows that if he can make you clean then you can heal and by healing, you live a more abundant life. I prayed often that I would love God more and that He would help me. Well, he heard that prayer when he ripped someone from my life that I had thought could fill a void in my heart. Now, I see that it took God removing that person from my life for me to understand His love for me and it makes me realize my need to cling to my Father in heaven first. It makes me sad at times that God would deem it necessary to do this in order for my stubborn heart to be cleaned out, but it also makes me aware that I never ever want to be so hard headed again that He has to do it twice.


So, recently I am learning that I have to fight to love God and I have to fight to love people with a pure, holy, and unselfish love. I have to fight against my flesh that tells me that other things can satisfy my spirit and heart. I have to fight against the enemy that says I can’t have overflowing relationships that are pleasing to God. I have to fight against my own desire to sabotage relationships prematurely because I fear God is going to take that person away or for fear of rejection…as my dad says, “let them feel the weight of who you are and then let them decide if they can handle it…”


At the end of the day I think of this. Love is a choice. It is a decision. Yes, there are emotions and goose bumps and butterflies; there are tears and laughter, but these things do not make up love, they only accompany certain stages of growing in love. So, at the end of the day I hope that I can say, at least majority of the time, that I loved deep, I loved hard, I loved without reservation or concern for myself, I loved unconditionally as Jesus did despite what others said about Him.


If you do not know what I am talking about try reading some of God’s Word. You’ll find the most splendid love story of all, just waiting to unfold before your eyes.

I John 3:19-24

This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.


Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.

"What Are You Full Of?"

Take Two…Let’s See where this takes us…


“To Echo”…this is one of my favorite definition of the word render. As a Christian (and by that I mean sold out follower of Jesus Christ, the God of the Bible…not a fake representation of something that we have no real relationship with…not a person who puts up a façade to make the world think that we are perfect…okay I am hopping off of the peach box. Ha.), I could only think about what it means to echo something. I know as a child when I would visit the caves in the hills of Tennessee (you know, the ones that have all the neat natural sculptures, running water, and man-made colored lights to give it a cool effect), how I use to want to yell and hear my voice echo throughout the canyons. Of course, the echo of my voice never sounded the same as my exact voice and it would eventually fade away as the sound waves got further and further away from their original source (in this case, my big mouth). The further away from the source, the less of a reflection the echo was to my ears.
This is exactly why I love that definition of the word render. If render means “to echo,” then what is my heart echoing to the world? What is YOUR heart echoing to the world? What is YOUR heart echoing to you? Whatever "source" we are closer to, is what we echo to the world and to ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I agree with the saying “Garbage in, garbage out. Righteousness in, righteousness out.” Some of you reading this are like, oh boy, another dumb Christian saying…blah blah blah…Well, you’re probably the one that has been in the same boat as me.


I don’t know about you but I may need an attitude check (1, 2, 3)..Okay we’re good to go. Take a deep breath and keep reading.


So, I have noticed that what I fill myself with is what oozes (this is a nasty sounding word) out of my heart and sometimes out of my mouth and my deeds towards other people…if not toward other people, then toward God. If I am filling myself with things that are pleasing to God, then hopefully that is what people get a dose of when they “bump into me” spiritually, emotionally, mentally, etc. Honestly, days that I have a bad attitude or people leave a sour taste in my mouth, it is because I am so consumed with myself or some “thing” that has caught my attention...and unfortunately that thing has placed itself on the throne where God should be sitting.


If we are to reflect Christ in our lives then our hearts have to be broken, broken over our sin and our struggle to continue returning to our own temptations or as some would say, to our own vomit. What would it look like if we decided to rend our hearts and break away from the things in life that do not fulfill us? I mean, what if we broke away from the sex, the drunkenness, the hate acts: or maybe you deem yourself a good person and do not act on these things. Well, what about lustful thoughts, envious thoughts, hateful reactions, jealousy; maybe you are overly emotional and hang your every emotion on what others say or don't say or do or don't do, etc. It is easy to think that if we do not act on things that it is not a hindrance in life but I beg to differ. When our hearts and minds linger on the things that God so desperately wants us to get rid of, we are licking up our own vomit and digging our own grave. For those of you who know Christ as Savior, you do not have to wait until you get to heaven to be free! For those of you do not know Christ yet, you do not have to change yourself to find perfect unrelenting love.


We can’t echo the heart of God to the world if we are so consumed with other things; if we want to sound like Jesus and echo Him to others then we have remain close to Him, the source of abundant life. Lately, God has been telling me to let Him search my heart and rend it away from anything that would be displeasing to Him. What a scary thing to do…because it hurts for him to search the inner most parts of my heart and see the imperfections. However, by letting Him break my heart I am learning to render my heart and my life to Him. This is when this life becomes truly satisfying. I am able to stand before God and before man pure and holy declaring His love, His peace, His joy, His faithfulness, His grace, His forgiveness, and His unrelenting pursuit of us.


In order to echo the voice and heart of God we have to be in tune with Him. God forgive me, forgive us for being so consumed with ourselves and with what we want; forgive us for not loving You and others first; forgive us for not allowing you to love others through us and declare Your life giving grace to the world.


Luke 6:44-46
"Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks."

Render Your Heart...

RENDER YOUR HEART...Many of you are probably wondering what that could possibly mean. I heard a song on the radio by a Christian artist and in the lyrics he was saying to "rend your heart." I am sometimes intelligent, but I had NO idea as to what that could mean. Therefore, I went on a journey to find out what someone is DOING when they REND their hearts. Rend is another word for separation, for splitting, for ripping, for scratching...does NOT sound very pleasant does it? Personally, I picture a cat fight...literally or figuratively. :)

But what was he saying to split your heart from? Well...I could guess and talk about that later! I like what that the word render means something a little different...and that is where I want to start.

To render-to melt down-to give up-to yield-to submit-to reflect-to impart-to restore-to echo...

These synonyms may not seem like much at first, but on this little journey called life, I have discovered that we all, no matter what our faith, religious beliefs, ethnicity, or cultural background submit our inner most being or our hearts to something or perhaps to someone. We reflect something or someone. One of my favorites among the list of words is "to echo." I will tell you all (the few of you that get a hold of this crazy attempt to have a voice and possibly write somethiing that can even possibly make a difference in someone's life) later why it is one of my favorites...

My desire in writing on this blog (after spending several hours of my day on a computer for work) is to hopefully share things about life. A few things about me you will find, but I hope that in reading the posts that I do write, you will find something greater to look at...or to search for.

Join me on this attempted journey and let me know your thoughts...I hope to keep it up but we shall see what my commitment level is!

Blessings!