#128: Inside Out

By -
Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it springs the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23)

Many processes in life have a course that they take - a direction that they must follow. For example, fluids will always flow from a region of higher pressure to a region of lower pressure, gravity will always pull everything towards the center of the earth, water will always flow downhill and heat will always flow from a hot object to a cold object. The writer of Proverbs also points us to a very important truth that most times we ignore or do not pay attention to. This truth is that the issues of life flow from inside out.

But what does this mean to us?

We actually spend the bulk of our life paying attention to the outside life (Matthew 15:11-20) and we wonder why we never get better with time. But Jesus addressed this when He said

you brood of snakes! How could evil men like you speak what is good and right. For whatever is in your heart determines what you say. A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. (Matthew 12:34-35).

Three lessons to pick from here is that:

  • If a person is good or bad, it can be traced to the heart the person has. By their fruits you will know them (Luke 6:43).
  • A heart has a treasury and so you have to keep it with all diligence. You need to guard what gets stored in the heart. If you keep watching, and listening to what would pollute the heart, that is what the treasury of the heart would be. But if you only allow edifying things into your heart, that is what its treasury would be.
  • you can make a new year resolution to do good things and say nice words, but if the resolve does not end with a change in heart, it will be a futile resolution because it is from the abundance of the heart that we speak (Luke 6:45). The issues of life springs from the heart.
In summary, if there is a leakage, and water is gushing out, it is unwise for you to go on mopping the floor. The wise thing to do is to take care of the leakage. If you want clean water to gush out of a vessel, the vessel must essentially be clean. If we spend sometime to give our heart to God and let God transform us, all our struggles will be taken care of. If the issues of life comes from the heart, then we have to pay serious attention to our heart and not our externals.

Thought: The condition of man kind is traced to the heart in man (Genesis 6:5, Jeremiah 17:9). But God has made a way out. Deuteronomy 30:6 says that the only solution to man's problem is the circumcision of the heart. In Ezekiel 36:26, God committed Himself to giving us a new heart. A heart of flesh that willingly obeys God, treasures the Word of God and produces fruits of righteousness.  How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping it in accordance to Your Word. Your Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against You (Psalms 119:9&11). The heart is very deceptive because the heart of a man is not external, it is not superficial and so hypocrisy can paint a wrong picture. But today as we go to God for a transformation, let us be honest with God, do not be hypocritical.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#152: FIRE

By -
Image
“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” (Mathew 3:11) I’ve been going through the book of Mathew for a while now and you won’t believe what I saw. Well, you may have seen it before, but as for me, I had just seen this for the first time in my life. I sure had read this verse a couple of times in my lifetime, but I just never saw what I had just seen. This was what I saw, “…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire”. The word that struck me was the ‘and’ between the Holy Spirit and Fire. Questions began to run through my mind like; Is the baptism of the Holy Spirit different from that of Fire? But Isn’t The Holy Spirit fire Himself? For days I looked upon this verse; I couldn’t forge ahead until I got light.  In the midst of my search, I fell ill; seriously ill that I couldn’t do anything, not even to pray or...
Read more

#149: THE FORGOTTEN ONE'S 3 (Final)

By -
Image
“I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, you are God’s building.” (1 Cor 3:6-9) What then can we do? Having established that the mandate to go out there where the people are is the duty of every believer, we’d like to take a look at the kind of believer that goes out there and ways in which the believer can reach out to others. One primary thing to take note of is that God can use anybody. He’s ever willing to use any vessel that is empty, available and yielded for His use. The vessel may be the same at different times, but the method or strategy may not always be the same at different times. A believer that will embark on this mission is a believer that is wholly dependent on the voice of the Holy Spi...
Read more

#126: The Story behind the Hymn I: When Peace, Like a River

By -
Author: Horatio Gates Spafford  (1873) In November, 1873, Horatio Spafford sent his wife and four daughters on the French ship  Ville du Havre  from their home in Chicago to a vacation in France, planning to set out a few days later himself. Somewhere in the Atlantic, the  Ville du Havre  collided with a British ship coming the other way, and sank in just 12 minutes. Of his family, only Spafford’s wife survived.  Spafford took the next boat over, and as he passed the spot where the ship went down, began to write, “When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll,” and continued until he had the text, “It is well with my soul.” His good friend, Philip Bliss, composed the tune for his words, naming it after the ship, VILLE DU HAVRE.  In this hymn, Spafford has given all of us words of comfort and assurance in times of physical and spiritual crisis, paraphrasing those familiar words of Julian of Norwich: “And all shall be well...
Read more