I want to talk to you about a subject that is of utmost importance. There are some truths in the bible that are what I would describe as “totalizing” truths. Truths that embrace the totality of our lives. It gets to the heart of the matter. And although it is good to talk about the details, to come back to these totalizing truths is helpful and needful from time to time. This verse is one of those. It is a profound truth:

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow all the springs of life…

Think of the things you guard with jealousy. Things that people keep a real close watch on. Bodies. Diets. Property. Portfolio. Sports team. Politics. There is nothing wrong with any of these things in themselves. Here’s what I want to know: How is your heart? Are you guarding your heart? Are you keeping watch over it? Are you as diligent (or more!) in watching over your heart, guarding your heart as these activities?

This is the great work of the Christian life. Of course the heart here is not talking about the muscle that pumps blood throughout our body. Rather it’s a metaphor for the inner man, the mind, will, and emotions. So let’s jump into this verse. May the Lord give us a Spirit of wisdom and revelation. 

The verse is pretty straight forward. First we hear a command: keep the heart. Then the way in which the command is to be carried out: keep the heart with all vigilance. And third, the reason given for such a command: from the heart flow all the springs of life. 

The command: Keep the heart… 

Of course, this presupposes something really important. It presupposes regeneration or the new birth. One cannot keep the heart if the only heart he has is the dead one that he was born with and needs to be taken out. One must be born again and given a new heart before he can keep the heart. The prophets in the OT prophesied of this. The prophet Ezekiel prophesied the following,

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 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. And I will put my Spirit within you… 36:25-27

God says, “I will give you a new heart”. Now some may have come in here today in need of a new heart. You have a heart of stone - my prayer is that God would reach into you today and pull that out and give you a new heart. But for those who are born again, you have received a new heart and then you are commanded to keep the heart.

John Flavel wrote, “The greatest difficulty in conversion is to win the heart to God, and the greatest difficulty after conversion is to keep the heart with God.”  God has done the great work of winning our hearts to him. Now we are to be constantly about the business of keeping our hearts with him. Some might be thinking that this is not necessary. God wins our hearts and he keeps our hearts without any effort on our part. But I would suggest, and I think you know this from experience, we have a lot of things pulling us in different directions every day - the world, the flesh, and the devil; the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life. And if we don’t put forth effort to resist those forces, we will get sucked along with them. So it truly is a serious, sober, and high calling to keep the heart with God. And I think, not only from this verse, but many other places (including NT) make this very explicit.

I think there are two errors Christians can fall into when it comes to the heart and our understanding of the heart. One error is the idea that now that I have a new heart and the Spirit indwells me, can’t I just follow the Spirit and go wherever he leads me and just sort of “blow with the wind of the Spirit”, as it were. Well, yes and no. Of course, we want to follow the Spirit. We want to go where he leads. But it is a serious mistake to think that the way we do that is to turn inward and uncritically follow all the inclinations, promptings, and hunches of our hearts. I think that is an error that some need corrected. 

On the other hand, the other error is to absolutize Jeremiah 17:9. Do you know Jeremiah 17:9? It says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it.” Can our hearts deceive us? Of course! But Christians - born again - have truly received a new heart! They really have. If that’s you, you really have received a new heart! For those who have experienced the new birth, something deep and profound has happened. “Whoever is in Christ, he is a new creation…” (2 Corinthians 5:17. And it is when we realize that God has done a work of profound grace in the heart to bring us to himself, to make us new people with a new heart, that we can keep the heart. 

In a way it is like abiding in Christ. Abiding assumes you are “in him”. It assumes you are a branch connected to the vine. And to abide is to remain. To stay connected to the vine. So the command is to keep the heart, which means you have a new heart in Christ to keep. In what manner do we keep the heart? This ups the ante.

The manner in which we keep: with all vigilance 

The manner in which we are to keep the heart is “with all vigilance”. The way this verse is constructed in Hebrew is fascinating. It says, “keep the heart with all keeping”. Or Keep, keep the heart. John Flavel says, “set double guards”. The force of this command in not merely saying “keep the heart”, but keep the heart with all vigilance or keep the heart with all keeping implies that we called the great effort. This is our duty. We are not told, “don’t worry about the heart, God’s got this…” No. Keep the heart with all vigilance. This is serious, difficult, and sometimes painful work. John Flavel said,

Heart-work is hard work indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a loose and heedless spirit, will cost no great pains; but to set yourself before the Lord, and tie up thy loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon Him; this will cost you something.”

This is one great business of the Christian life. This is our duty. Though it is our duty, it is not done by our power, but by God’s. Keeping the heart is hard work that we do in the Lord’s strength. It is not as though we grit our teeth, pull up our bootstraps, dig our heels in, and work in our own strength. No! We work to keep our hearts in the strength of God’s grace. Or put another way, we keep our hearts by faith. Remember the great chapter of faith. All of these men and women who did hard things - Noah built the ark, men conquered kingdoms… and how did they do it? By faith. Noah really did build the ark, but he did it by faith. We really are to roll our sleeves up and keep the heart with all vigilance “by faith”. 

Paul gives us this amazing statement of his hard work and God’s grace converging in 1 Corinthians 15:10 when he said, 

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

Brothers and sisters, the command to keep the heart with all vigilance calls us to the task of hard work. But we may rest assured that God is fully willing to give us the divine energy we need to carry it out as we do it. Far too many cannot be bothered to do this. And for them, there is a grave danger of in the end being found a mere professor of Christ and not a possessor of Him. There is a grave danger in neglecting the heart. Listen to Hebrews 3:12-14 

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.

So keep your heart with all vigilance. Keep it near to God. There are two metaphors that come to mind relating to this. The first one is like setting up guards at the gates of a fortress. Keeping the heart is like that. The guards are well equipped and cautious about how and what is let in the fortress. The fortress is the heart. And we need to be careful about what we let in. Job made a covenant with his eyes. David said, “I will not set before my eyes anything that is worthless” (Psalm 101:3). The Psalmist (may have been David) turned it into a prayer, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things” (Psalm 119:37). Same thing with our ears. We want to guard what we look at, watch, listen to… because it can and often does affect our hearts. 

The other metaphor is one of keeping a garden. A good gardener makes sure his garden is in a spot to get plenty of sun. He makes sure that it’s watered. And he makes sure that he picks weeds. How many know it doesn’t take long before the weeds take over the garden. Your heart is like a garden. A neglected heart is like a garden overrun by weeds. It chokes out the things you want to see grow. When sin (envy, lust, greed, laziness, etc.) is allowed to grow in our hearts, it will choke out the graces that the Spirit desires to produce in our lives. And it chokes out the vitality of our communion with God.

And so we must keep our hearts with all vigilance. We must guard with all guarding. 

The reason: For from it flow the springs of life… 

This is the great motive. Why keep the heart? Why bother? Why put forth the effort? Because from the heart flow all the springs of life! The heart, this inner man, the seat of the will, mind, and emotions - is the command and control center of you. This is so crucial. Listen again to John Flavel:

The heart is the source of all vital operations; it is the spring and original of both good and evil, as the spring in a watch that sets all the wheels in motion. The heart contrives and the members execute. 

The members being hands, feet, lips, etc. This is not original with John Flavel. He’s echoing what Jesus said in Matthew 12:

“Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. (Matthew 12:33-35)

So keeping the heart is not just so that you have a nice, private relationship with God… so that your quiet times are really good, and your personal love for God is growing. All of that is great. But from the heart flow all the springs of life. The heart that is kept with God will affect all the other areas of life. And the heart that is disordered and twisted will as well. 

It is gravely concerning when people talk about how great their walk is with God when their life is a mess. But from the heart that is kept with God all sorts of evidence of life will spring forth. Your speech, your work, how you parent, your relationship with your spouse, your friends, your kids, your parents. It will affect how you spend your time and money. It will affect your outlook on life and the future. It will affect how you worship and your faithful commitment to God and his people. 

From the heart flow all the springs of life. So when Jesus talks about taking sin seriously - cut off your hand / gouge out your eye - we understand he is using hyperbole, because the problem is not ultimately the eye or the hand, but the heart. We could literally cut off the hand and the problem remains unsolved. The issue is the heart, from which come murderous and adulterous thoughts and covetousness. From the heart flow the springs of life. 

It’s important to guard the heart like armed soldiers guarding the gates of a fortress - keeping certain things out. That’s important. It’s also important to keep the heart like a garden - pulling weeds out that threaten your good plants. But that’s not enough. 

Keep the heart full of God

The best way to keep the heart with God is to keep the heart full of God. If your heart is full of God and full of his truth and you have a yielded heart to him and his will, your heart will be kept with him. There is an interesting connection between what we see here in Proverbs 4:23 and the words of Jesus in John 7:37-38:

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

He was talking about the Holy Spirit who was to be given after Christ was glorified. And he has been glorified. The Spirit has been given. But is your heart full of the Spirit? I don’t mean have you been filled with the Spirit. But are you now? Are rivers of living water flowing out of your heart? This is not a one off thing. Paul talks not merely about being filled with the Spirit, but about continually being filled with the Spirit. 

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be [continually] filled with the Holy Spirit… (Ephesians 5:18)

And to be filled with the Spirit will lead to a love for his truth… since of course he is the Spirit of truth. So to be filled with the Spirit will inevitably lead to a heart full of truth and love for truth. And so it’s not just a matter of keeping certain things out of your heart. You also want your heart to be fed well and nourished on a rich spiritual diet of truth. 

So keep your heart. Do so with all vigilance. Set guards at the gates of your heart. Be diligent to pull the weeds of sin up quickly. Make sure to keep your heart full of God and his truth. And be zealous in this, because from the heart flow the springs of life… all of them.