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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community
Chapel.
My name is Joe,
I'm one of the pastors here,
and I'm really glad that you've come.
And if you are worshiping in East Hall
and I'm up on the screen
or you worship in the gym,
I'm up on the screen,
you know, I'm really glad you're here too.
So thanks for coming.
All right,
this is our last week of our ten-week
series in Proverbs.
We've been looking for wisdom,
and we have called
this series More Wisdom, More Life.
And the Proverb
we're going to look at today,
we saved for last
because it's so fundamental.
This is the Proverb. Proverbs
chapter four verse 23 says,
keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
I've memorized that in a different version
years ago,
and the version I memorize says this.
Above all else,
guard your heart, for from it
flow the issues of life above all else.
I like that
because it's talking about priority
and it says above all else
it doesn't say guard your career,
or guard your reputation, or even guard
your family.
It says above all else, guard your heart.
Guard your heart.
I have a friend,
I'll call her Mandy,
who is very allergic to anything
dairy. All dairy products.
And I have known other people who've been
allergic to dairy where they have,
if they eat ice cream or something,
they have to run to the bathroom.
Mandy is in a different category.
A couple of months ago,
she went to a restaurant
and she ordered a vegan meal
to make sure it was dairy free.
And evidently,
on the way out of the kitchen,
the chef took some parmesan cheese
like this and just sprinkled it on the top
by mistake.
Real parmesan cheese.
And Mandy took one bite, one bite.
She had to have
four EpiPens and ended up in ICU.
Right?
I've talked to her, say,
how do you keep safe?
And she says, oh, you know,
I am very careful.
Like she never eats anything on a plane.
No matter how far she is flying.
She rarely eats in restaurants,
is very careful in someone else's home.
She has to be vigilant
because her life depends on it.
That's what Solomon is saying here.
He's saying, guard your heart
because your life depends on it now.
Here are my three points.
The really three questions.
First, what is your heart?
What is your heart?
Why guard your heart?
And then finally, how do we do it?
What is your heart?
Why guard your heart?
Why do we do it first? What is your heart?
You're in our culture.
When we talk about heart,
we're really connected to passion.
If you're sitting
watching a basketball game
and the guy next to you says, oh,
that kid plays with heart,
you know what he's saying is that kid
tries harder than anyone else like that.
He is all in. Right?
That's the the big thing.
If I tell my wife I love you
with all my heart, I'm telling her
that I am exclusively hers
romantically, that I am all in.
But when the Bible talks about heart,
it doesn't just limit it to passion.
It talks about your thoughts.
It says as a
as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
It talks about your will.
You choose
based on what your heart desires.
I mean, we we talked about that
a couple of weeks ago, that given
any choice, every human being will choose
what you most want, what you most desire.
And that's the result of your heart,
what you love.
The poet Emily Dickinson
was the first one to say your heart wants
what it wants
and you cannot fight that right.
So your heart is the center of your
your will,
your desires, your thinking, your passion.
It's the real you.
And first Samuel, God talks
to the prophet Samuel sends him
to find the next king of Israel.
And he sends him to the home of a man
named Jesse, who's got a slew of sons.
And Samuel is surprised that God picks
the youngest son, David,
to be the next king of Israel.
And the way God explains it to Samuel's,
he says, basically,
people look on the outside appearance,
but I look on the inside.
Well, God is saying is I
look at the real person
and he refers to it as their heart.
And so what is your heart?
Your your heart is the real you.
It's everything that you are all combined.
It's why you do what you do.
It's your heart.
The second question is
why guard your heart?
I'll give you three reasons, right?
The first is that your heart
is evidently in danger.
Otherwise God wouldn't say to guard it.
It's.
It's both precious and it's vulnerable.
It has to be both. Like in my house.
I have a couple of old shovels.
If I'm out working in the yard
and I forget,
and I leave those outside all night,
I'm not worried about it.
One, they don't mean that much to me.
Two nobody. One of them, right.
But I have a very expensive bicycle
that I would never leave outside
because I like it.
I want to keep that bicycle
and other people might want it.
Your heart
is vulnerable because your heart is
constantly being influenced,
whether you realize it or not.
Every advertisement you have ever seen
is designed
to influence your heart.
You have an algorithm in your phone
that is influence its design.
They design
those algorithms to influence your heart.
I remember talking to a high school kid
when I was in high school ministry,
and we were talking about the movies
he was watching, the music
he was listening to, and he was saying,
they don't impact me.
And I was going, I think they do.
And I remembered
I read an article about how much it cost
to have a Super Bowl commercial,
and I looked it up this week
just so I could use this illustration for
a 32nd commercial during the Super Bowl.
It cost $8 million just for that slot.
And so what I told this kid basically
is, listen,
you may think that it's not impacting you.
There are some really well paid
advertising executives who are betting
$8 million.
They can influence you in 30s
at least a little bit.
You have to believe a two hour movie
and constantly listening
to music is going to influence you, right?
You are constantly having things influence
people want.
I am trying to influence you right
now, right?
That's the way it works.
So that's the first thing.
You guard your heart
because your heart is vulnerable and it's
constantly being influenced towards
something.
The second thing is, whoever has your
heart, whatever has your heart has you.
Whoever whatever has your heart has you.
I remember being at a banquet
that was a fundraiser for a ministry,
and it was a ministry to kids.
And the speaker who got up to do the ask,
you know, you go to any fundraiser,
somebody's going to get up and do the ask.
He used like a
an image I don't think I'll ever forget,
he said, imagine that
there are two buildings side by side.
Each of them like 90 stories high.
And in the 90th story
window,
there's a plank between the two buildings.
What would it take
for you to walk across that plank?
And then he changed it to himself.
He said people could offer me money,
but the wind blowing and it being 1000ft
fall, you know, I don't know
how much money you could offer me.
Because what good is money
if I fall and die?
You could try to make me do it
through fear.
Maybe.
Maybe I'll tell you how you could do it.
He said you put my kids
in the other window,
and then you set that building on fire.
You could not stop me.
Do you feel that?
But whatever has your heart
has you, right?
That's the second thing.
The third reason you guard your heart
is that your heart
is the key to your capacity to love.
Period.
To love God, to love other people,
even to love yourself.
Your heart is the thing that determines
that.
You know, some years ago
I developed a heart condition called AFib.
Now I'm fine now,
but AFib for some people,
it makes their heart race
so they feel like the shot of adrenaline.
And that's not the way my AFib works.
The way my AFib works is my
my heart goes out of rhythm
and it just beats weird inefficiently.
And the way I describe it to people is it.
I know when I'm out of rhythm
because I feel systemically poor,
it impacts everything.
That's where your heart is with love.
Your heart is the is the key
to unleashing your capacity to love God.
I mean, every week
I feel like I meet people here
who will say that their lives
have been totally changed.
Last week, you know, we had baptism
and I did the same thing at every service
where I said, listen, if you're here
and you want to get baptized,
you can leave right now
and it won't hurt my feelings.
I was out in the tent on Sunday morning
and I did that thing
and I didn't notice,
but a guy slipped out.
He's about my age.
Zach told me his story
later on in his story was that
he just said six years ago,
he's in a really dark place.
And his wife forced him to come to church.
And he said, I have been absolutely,
utterly and completely changed.
And I happened to
I didn't know that story at the time.
But after I preached out in the tent,
somebody had asked me to baptize them
in East Hall, so I had to have
somebody else close the service.
And I was walking to east,
and I ran into this guy
and he had his shirt on, you know, that,
you know, the baptism shirt.
And he like,
he was like, I'm getting baptized.
I said, good job.
And he was so full of joy.
And his eyes just brimmed
with tears and joy.
And then I heard a story.
What happened?
And I hear stories like that all the time.
This is what happened.
This is the prophet Ezekiel.
God says, and I will give you a new heart
and a new spirit I will put within you.
And I will remove the heart of stone
from your flesh
and give you a heart of flesh.
That's the first thing that happens.
Then it impacts
your your capacity to love other people.
The night before Jesus went to the cross,
he gathered his disciples
and he said, I new commandment
I give to you, that you love each other.
And then he said this, by this
all people will know
that you're my disciples by your love
for each other.
40 days later, when the church exploded
on the day of Pentecost in Acts
chapter two, the defining kind of factor
of the defining characteristic
of the group of people that had become
Christians was their love for each other.
That's
what made the early church so attractive,
because people would come in
and they had never seen people
love each other
the way Christians loved each other.
What happened?
The heart was changed.
Your heart is the key to your capacity
to love God, love others,
but also even love yourself, not listen.
I'm not a big proponent of people who say,
you know, you got to love yourself first
before you love other people because,
you know, the people
I've known who really love themselves
never get around
to loving other people very much. But
the people that
I know that struggle
with loving themselves are people that
have been damaged, usually as children,
but they didn't experience love,
or they didn't feel like they experienced
love the way they needed love.
And it makes me think of Matthew
chapter eight.
What they need is a love
that comes into them that is so strong
that it can actually heal
the wounds from not being loved.
That's what you need.
In Matthew chapter eight, there's a story
of a leper who goes to Jesus.
Now in the first century,
if you had leprosy, you had to shout
all the time, unclean, unclean,
so that people could stay away.
It was considered a contagious disease.
People didn't want to come close
to somebody who was a leper.
And in Matthew eight it says, he went up
to Jesus and he fell on his knees.
And he said, if you are willing,
you can make me clean.
And Jesus, it
says, reached out and touched him.
You didn't have to touch him,
but he touched him and doesn't say how
he touched him or where he touched him.
But in my mind's eye, always think that
this guy knelt in front of Jesus.
And I think Jesus knelt
and then cupped his face in his hands
and looked at him and said, be healed.
Be healed.
What would it be like to look in the eyes
of the headwaters of love
and have him say, I love you?
Be healed?
The reason you want to guard your heart
is that it's vulnerable.
You're being influenced all the time.
One way
everybody wants to influence your heart
because if they have the heart,
your heart, they have you.
And your heart is the key
for your capacity
to love God, love others, love yourself.
It's the whole kit and caboodle.
If you love God, love yourself,
love others.
You are having a great life, right?
So that's why guard your heart.
The brings me to
my last thing is how do you do it?
How do you guard your heart? Two ways.
Two things protect it and feed it first.
Protect it. My friend Mandy,
the one with dairy allergy.
You know,
she didn't get in the ICU because
she decided to go on an ice cream bender.
I mean, she didn't say,
you know, throw caution to the wind.
I'm going to finally live my life
the way everyone else lives their life.
I'm going to curl up
with a pint of Haagen-Dazs
and just binge my my favorite series.
That's not what she did.
What she did was she took one bite
of a dish that had what for her
was poison, something she was allergic to.
This is what I think.
I think you're much more.
Your soul is much more allergic
to sin than you think.
It is my soul.
Much more allergic.
I think we we look at sin like we think,
you know, we can indulge in a little bit.
It's kind of like having a little bit
ice cream. Yeah.
You may you may pay for it later on,
but it tastes good and it's not that bad.
And you're going to recover.
But that's not what the Bible says.
The Bible says you were wildly.
Your soul is wildly and terribly,
terribly allergic to sin.
This is what it says in James,
he says, but
each person is tempted when he is lured
and enticed by his own desire.
Then desire, when it has conceived,
gives birth to sin, and sin
when it is
fully grown, brings forth death.
So I want
you to know is when I say protector,
I mean
stop thinking that you're just going
to indulge in a little,
just a little lust.
You're going to indulge
in a little bit of greed,
a little bit of envy,
a little bit of holding a grudge
because you deserve to hold a grudge.
You think it's a little bit,
but you don't know how
allergic your soul is to sin.
You don't know what will land you.
And I see you, Solomon, as I grabbing us,
trying to shake us, and said, don't
you know
above all else guard your heart.
You are allergic to some of the stuff
that you put in your heart.
That's the first thing protected.
The second thing is feed it.
You know, there are a lot of people on
our staff that are very health conscious.
You means you
can stop a certain person on our staff.
They can tell you how much protein
you ought to be eating per kilogram.
You know,
you'd stop somebody else to tell you
the advantage of collagen or creatine, or
how much if you sit in a sauna, how much
it will reduce your risk of stroke.
It's a lot.
And the reason they do
that is because more and more we realize,
all of us realize that to be healthy,
you can't just stop doing bad stuff.
You have to start doing good stuff
if you really want to be healthy.
And that's the way it is with God.
And I was trying
to think of it, of an image to give you.
And I came up with this.
If I could give you like a jewel
like this, just a little trinket.
And I said, if
if you will hold it in your left hand
for any length of time,
it'll increase your capacity for love.
Love of God,
love of other people, love of yourself.
It'll give you the the possibility
and the the probability
of having more joy, more peace,
more patience.
Well, every day when you woke
up, it'd be right there.
Be right on your nightstand.
You'd pick it up
first thing in the morning.
You drink your coffee with this
in your left hand,
you're going your car
and the soft light you'd reach over.
Pick this up and grab it and hold it,
because you would want your soul
to be as healthy as possible.
You know, every morning when I wake up,
I spend time
with God, and I don't do it
because I'm checking a box.
I do it because of this,
because I'm thinking I want to be
as healthy as possible.
I want to do
I do it because it's like exercise to me.
This is what Paul says in
Philippians four.
He says, finally, brothers,
whatever is true, whatever is honorable,
whatever is just, whatever is pure,
whatever is lovely,
whatever is commendable,
if there is any excellence, if there is
anything worthy of praise,
think about these things.
What he's saying is think about Jesus.
Like when you get up tomorrow morning,
what I want you to do
is just just spend a little time
thinking and telling yourself the gospel.
There's a God in heaven
who loves you so much that he sent Jesus.
This morning
when I was sitting with my Bible
and my journal,
which I do every morning, decided
because I knew I was preaching
this message, decided to close my eyes.
And what I tried to imagine is what
it would be like to kneel before Jesus
and have him
kneel, cup my face in his hands
and say to me, Joe, be healed,
Joe, I love you.
What would it be
like to look into the eyes
of the headwaters of love and have him
say, I love you?
Solomon says above all else,
if you don't do anything
else, guard your heart
because your heart is vulnerable.
The heart is the real you.
Your heart will determine your capacity
for love and joy and peace.
To love God, love each other,
love yourself for life.
So this is my thing.
Protect your heart.
Feed your heart.
More wisdom, more life.
Do you pray with me,
father in heaven?
I'm so grateful.
I'm grateful that you want us to be
as healthy as we possibly can.
I'm glad that you tell us in the Bible
what we are allergic to, and the sin
that can absolutely land us
in ICU and really destroy our souls.
Thank you that you gave us a heart
for passion, for our will, for our desires
and our love.
And I pray for everybody here
that you will transform our hearts,
that we will spend time with you
every day
so that you can renew our hearts.
Make us as healthy as we can possibly be.
Give us more life as we grow in wisdom.
Thank you.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.