Everything Flows From Your Heart

By Dr. Josh Bundy

We've been talking about the book of Proverbs, and we're going to jump right in. We'll read some scripture, so follow with me if you will. Today's message is about the heart. Everything you do flows from your heart. Look at this verse from Proverbs 3:5 with me. "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." Now we've got a longer passage, but this verse... It's one of the most famous verses from the book of Proverbs. It's on coffee mugs and pillows in many places, right? Trust. Uh, not lean not on your own understanding, trust in the Lord with all your heart. So look at the, the longer passage that this verse is in. Last week we introduced that the first nine chapters of Proverbs are speeches from a father to a son or sons, but they're for everyone. They're meant for all of us to read to gain wisdom.

Here's the verse in its larger setting. "My son, do not forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your hearts. For they will prolong your life many years and bring you peace and prosperity. Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. Then you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to him and he will make your path straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Thank you, God, for your word.

Now what we need to do is recognize that heart, the language about heart, can be defined as an internal feature. So we're going to look at the heart as your inner life and look at the definition here. With me, we all know that the heart as a noun, that can be an organ. Okay, the heart as an organ, but we're looking at heart as an internal feature. This is the locus, the center of a person's thoughts, like their mind. Their volition, so you have what they're choosing to do. Emotions and knowledge of right from wrong, which is what we call conscience, understood as the heart. Now, I do want you to take notes and write things down, as you know. But, uh, this week in the email, we sent you the slides from last week's sermon. And we're going to post the slides again to this week's sermon. So you can take notes on whatever you want, but the slides will be posted. What I really want you to do is to take notes about what's happening in your heart.

As you read these things now, while this remains up, let me just read you one verse from Psalm 139 which we're going to look at in greater detail next week. But the Bible says things about this, about this internal feature of our lives. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. This is where the reality that we have an inner feature exists. Comes into discipleship, which we're going to visit again before the sermon is over, that there's discipleship to do. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me. Know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me. Lead me in the way everlasting. Next week we'll look at Psalm 139 more. But this is how, when you take in your notes here, learn, learn, but also do work with Jesus. About your heart, what's going on in your thoughts, your volition, your emotions, your conscience. Now here's a few ways that we can see that this, this noun, this definition of heart is, It often shows up in the Bible, whether you're talking about the Hebrew Old Testament, the Greek New Testament, and we use it this way also in our modern lingo. So look at these examples.

Genesis 6:5 "the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on earth. And that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time." He doesn't mean the organ. He means the inner feature, the inner world. This has to do with volition and conscience of humankind. From the New Testament, Greek, but in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Okay, and this is not something that can be done with mere organ. It's also not something that can be done with mere emotion. Revering Christ as Lord is going to have something to do with volition as well as emotion and conscience as well as allegiance. I'll say more on that. But think about the way we use it in modern English. Here's one saying, it's not the size of the person in the fight, but the size of the heart in the person. We're using that In the very same way that scripture uses that to mean internal features. So does this make sense to you? Is this landing? The Bible uses heart to mean our inner world. You might think of it actually in terms of head and heart. When they say heart, they're summing up everything that are inner processes.

Now we're gonna look at our reading one more time with some underlined words that highlight inner realities. My son, don't forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your heart. You see, we've got that, that's an inner reality. Peace is one of those inner features. Let love and faithfulness, you know, that's an allegiance or an attitude. Okay, it's a volitional choice, faithfulness. Never leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart. The Bible views... Your heart as being editable. Okay. In other words, now today you can edit a lot of PDFs if you got the fancy paid PDF editor thing, but it used to be That you could edit Word documents, but once it was in a PDF, it was like in stone. Some of you remember that, okay? Nothing's in stone now with AI, right? But your heart has always been the word document format. Information can be added, deleted, rearranged, changed, shaped. Write it on the tablet of your heart. Then you'll win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. There's another internal feature. It has to do with what you know. In all your ways submit to him. He'll make your path straight. Don't be wise in your own eyes. Fear the Lord. That's an allegiance. It's also a volitional choice and shun evil. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. So we can see that the Bible uses this idea. To talk about a big part of who you are that may or may not ever be shown to others. You might or might not reveal this about yourself.

Uh, here's some illustrations. Okay. There's a movie that came out, um, about ten years ago called Inside Out. It's a Pixar movie. Anybody ever seen Inside Out? There's a teenage girl and she's got five personified emotions. Okay, so this is her version of Lady Wisdom. These personified emotions live in her headquarters. And they're called joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. And it's a pretty good movie. I mean, it's very cute. It's a good movie. And that's good enough for a movie. But for our purposes, we want to think of our headquarters as having additional personifications Such as the character of volition, affection, understanding, allegiance, desire, or conscience. These are other voices inside our headquarters. Got it? Makes sense? Think of a book you may have read or heard of called The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. If you haven't read it, it is a little heady, but it's worth the time to work through. He's discussing modern education. And he uses a phrase, men without chests. And when he says men without chests, he means people whose consciences and affections are underdeveloped. It's like they do. They don't forget leg day. They forget conscience day. Right? They do the upper body, they do the lower body, but they don't have, they don't do chest day internally. They don't do work on affections. And what he's talking about is people who are unable to recognize absolute beauty. They're unable to recognize objective truth and beauty, universal goods. He says they'll look at a waterfall and say, well, it's in the eye of the beholder. And Lewis wants to make the appeal and say, "No." It's beautiful because it's majestic in itself because this is how God positioned it to be because it has a glory and beauty of its own.

Now, the third illustration is this in current culture and pop culture, there's a formational instruction that said all the time that people follow your. Follow your to-do list. No, burn your to-do list and follow Jesus. Follow your heart. It's said all the time as formational instruction. It's actually a discipleship tool from one view of how to live. It often is reduced in meaning to follow your emotional impulses. Do what feels right. You only live once and so on. But your heart is, to put it in the words of Boston, "more than a feeling." Everyone born 1970 or earlier understands this. More than a feeling. All right. Your heart is more than that.

And the biblical response is not to say, follow your heart. The biblical response is to say, you will follow your heart, so get a good one. This is why it's so important in scripture. The world is saying follow your impulses, follow those emotions or those desires. Scripture is saying you don't have to be told that. You will do that. So how do you get a good heart? This is why the Bible says everything you do flows from your heart.

Look at the next proverb, Proverbs 4:23 It's in the very next speech. It says above all else, guard your heart. For everything you do flows from it. In the 1984 NIV that I was raised reading, it says it like this, for it is the wellspring of So you've got kids in the 1990s walking around saying, guard your heart, it's the wellspring of life. You know, guard your heart becomes this Christian college campus. Playful, ironic way to comment on awkward, emotional, or romantic social situations.

Now, I went to a private Christian university, and so I lived in this awkward world of Christian romance. You're supposed to follow your heart, but not follow your heart. My wife went to one where this became a real fad, uh, John Brown University in Siloam. And during her time there, people would say things like this. These aren't quotes. These are like this. They would say things like, "You just met her last week and you're already praying together alone? Bro, guard your heart!",  "We broke up because God told her to guard her heart.",  "She walked by and he started quoting the song of Solomon. Somebody tell that man to guard his heart!"

Now the real issue here is... The real issue in this verse is that guard your heart is so important because the Bible believes you will follow it. You really can't even help but to follow your heart. So you need a good one. And there's two misunderstandings, at least two deep ones. And this is the first one of what that phrase means. Guard your heart is misunderstood when we think it means protect your emotions or self-esteem. Guard your heart does not mean never allow yourself to get hurt. Now, there's other wisdom, like if you're a person who constantly allows yourself to get hurt, we need to talk about that. If you're in a relationship where somebody hurts you repeatedly and abusively, you need help for that. But this verse against some popular Christian interpretations doesn't mean never allow yourself to get hurt. It's not about protecting your ego. Your dating life or your self-esteem tied to great sports or achievements. It is a call to guard your inner life, the core of who you are, from becoming polluted. By such as pride, arrogance, self-reliance, or ungodliness. And more than that, the heart in this verse isn't about feelings alone, but the wellspring of your values, desires, and decisions. So that when your heart is shaped by God's wisdom, everything else flows from that center in a healthy direction. This is what the verse is truly about. And we all have false ways of guarding our heart in this first sense. We all have ways that protect our emotions or self-esteem sinfully like defensiveness, aggression, sarcasm, or cynicism. Is, you know, you don't have to put your hand up, but I'm asking you to consider, is there any place in your heart, search me, oh God. Know my heart. God, is there any way in my heart that is leading to my defensiveness? Is there anything in my heart leading to my aggression? Is there something in my heart leading to my sarcasm or my cynicism? Would he be so kind as to show it to you if you asked him? He might. Also, but this is patently more Christian and more subtle.

Two other negative ways we protect our self-esteem in Christianity are over-spiritualizing and people-pleasing. So you have to ask, search me, oh God, and know my heart. Search me, oh God, am I over-spiritualizing things? Am I people-pleasing in the name of love or serving or whatever? Because any of these can be a cover of For fear, heartbreak, or indecision where we don't need deflection but discipleship for our hearts. We don't need defensive maneuvers. We need discernment, not detachment, so that we won't retreat from life, but engage in our own lives in healthier and more sustainable ways. Amen? And I've not yet mentioned what might be the most dangerous false way, the second one up here, of guarding our hearts, which is not only a relationship killer, but is sometimes based on terrible theology. A terrible application of scripture by people who themselves don't seem to have the necessary wisdom and understanding. And that is, this number two is emotional numbing or to block your emotions. Guard your heart does not mean to block your emotions.

Now, I want to read... Uh, quote from Reddit. That broke my heart when I found this. Let me just start with it. "Did anyone else just shut down emotionally when told to guard your heart?" This is from posted by someone who called themselves ex-Christian. "Growing up with Christian parents, I was always told to guard my heart." Now, look at this carefully. And... Now, what's going on here is there's two different parts of the Bible that have just been summoned to make a case about the human heart, and they've been put side by side. Where they're not side by side in scripture. Let me show you the other verse. It's Jeremiah 17:9 This is the desperately wicked part. Now my NIV reads like this. "The heart is deceitful above all things." Anybody know that your heart leads you astray? You can put your hand up on this one. Let's own it. Has your heart ever led you astray? My heart's been deceitful. My volition, my desires, my conscience are not always good. Okay. But look at what the NIV says. Now that's sad. And we need salvation. But look at what the old King James Version said. "The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." Now, Hebrew poetry is often very hard to translate and sometimes even harder to interpret. But what happens here is that sometimes people will read a fine version like the King James that says, Which is not the final answer. It's not the answer of Jesus. It's not the answer of grace. It's not the message of salvation. It's the problem that needs the cure. But what they receive from this is you're wicked and your emotions are wicked and you're wicked for feeling things. This is what happened to this young person. Look at the new American standard, ninety-five "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick." See, this is, this is a more accurate or more helpful translation. In that it leads to the question, what is the medicine for it?

Now I want to, I want to finish the Reddit quote because you need to see how desperate this is. "I was told to guard my heart and it was desperately wicked. I was always told that heart referred to emotions." See, that's the wrong definition. "As a result, I would swallow my feelings down literally. I would feel the need to cry or get angry and instead I would hold my breath and just shake until the feeling passed. I had a game I'd play with myself during my teenage years called the psychopath game. I would watch disturbing and gruesome media and see how little emotion I would feel watching it. I was so proud of how good I was at guarding my heart and I thought God would be pleased at me for how little emotion I felt. Now that I'm an adult and starting to lose my faith, I'm waking up to my emotional side again."

This is what happens to people when they haven't been rightly taught from scripture that the emotional side is a gift from God.

I don't know if my Did anyone else shut down their emotional side as a result of being told that your feelings are deceptive and wicked? Now, again, I don't want you to raise your hand, but I want you to think about this. Have you, have you shut down your emotional side? Because of some teaching or theology that emotions can't be trusted, they're wicked, the heart is wicked. You know, if the world says follow your heart, Christians are going to say something the opposite like don't listen to your heart. Is that what you were taught or is that what you believe? Because we need to expose that to the light, brothers and sisters. We got to bring that into the open and say that God gave you your whole heart. He gave you your emotional center. Guard your heart does not mean to block up your emotions. It doesn't mean shutting down your emotions or avoiding vulnerability. Emotions are part of how God made you. They reflect his image and help you experience love, compassion, grief, joy, and even righteous anger.

Think of it this way. If it helps you, Your car has dashboard lights that will come on and off when the car needs something and you don't hate them as being wicked. They just tell you time to check the engine and then there's deeper work to do. They tell you you're out of gas and hopefully you see it before you're actually out of gas because they give you that little extra so that you can get to the gas station and hopefully you're learning discipleship in your emotions and So that you can recognize I'm out of gas before you're actually fully out of gas, out of faith, out of love, or out of hope. God gave them as signals, as warnings, as lights to say, get help now. Turn to me.

What's more, guard your heart means guiding your emotions, not suppressing them. It's choosing not to let feelings rule your life or lead you into sin while still staying emotionally open to God and others. A guarded heart is not a hardened heart. It's a wisely directed one. Amen. Amen. God help us. As we began to say a few minutes ago about the pop culture thing, follow your heart. If the cultural meaning is to do what feels right. And the Christian response has too often been deny how you feel and stop living your life. It's no wonder that so many people feel enslaved to their emotions. They either let their emotions control them. Or feel compelled to suppress and battle against them. Neither approach leads to peace or a healthy sense of self because both approaches lack two key ingredients, truth and grace.

How the Holy Spirit Transforms the Inner Life of Believers

So finally, what we need from God is help to disciple our hearts. Our inner world needs discipleship like our outer world needs prayer. And fasting and singing and confession. Our heart needs discipleship as well. Jesus knows this. I want to show you that he agrees with the Proverbs, and then I want to show you that he has hope for us. Matthew twelve thirty-four Jesus says the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. This is Jesus's version of guard your heart for it's the wellspring of life where all of your life flows from it. You know, Jesus isn't going to be a coy with people about this. He's like, you said it, you meant it. You might not know you meant it, but a part of you meant it. For Jesus, look at Matthew 15:18-19, the things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart, and it's these that defile them. Now, not to go into all of it today, but he goes into greater detail about all of this in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew chapter five he'll say things like, You hate a brother in your heart. You've already murdered him in your heart. You look at a woman lustfully. You've already committed adultery in your heart. Jesus is really serious about the idea that you will follow your heart. That's why you need a new ones. And so, knowing this, Matthew shows us Jesus is aware of our heart problem.

John in his gospel is going to show us that Jesus is the cure. The heart is beyond cure is what the NIV said, right? It is sick and needs help, needs medicine. The heart turns out not to be incurable after all. It's merely uncurable by your effort and mine. What the Proverbs begin in our hearts, Jesus will finish. Jesus said, whoever believes in me, as scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them. And by this, he promised that the Spirit would live inside of you, the Holy Spirit of God.

Now, what does that do to your headquarters? You get Jesus and you get the Spirit in your life. What does that do to your headquarters? Does it mean that personified envy immediately gets evacuated? No. But it means that the Holy Spirit, who is now in your life as an actual person, not just a personification of some affection, allegiance, or feeling, Is going to be working with you in partnership with you by God's grace and by the Spirit's power to make envy a less controlling personification in your life. And to make compassion a greater one. And each of those negative traits, the Spirit is going to work to lower that influence and raise up some godly traits.

Uh, Jesus replied in the gospel of John 14:23, "anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them." So not only does the Holy Spirit move into your heart, Jesus promises you get the whole Trinity. Make room, Jesus says, in your heart. The Father's coming, the Son is coming, and the Spirit is coming. We're all moving in. He says, peace I leave with you. That's an internal reality. My peace I give you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid of This is to say, by saying that the peace of Jesus is not like the world's peace, he means it's not based on external circumstances. Okay, it's not peace because the bills got paid this month. Or she said, I forgive you, let's move on, or whatever it might be. It's peace that's based on the reliable gift of God. It's an inside peace that changes and rewrites the tablet.

Finally, Paul, who is a disciple of Jesus, but kind of late in the game, and he writes all these encouraging letters to churches, he will write things like this in Philippians 4 This is discipleship for your inner world. This is how, if you believe in Jesus, if you believe that the Father and the Spirit have come to you, how do you then appropriate or apply these great gifts of salvation? Paul says, Noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable, if anything's excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. Actually means to change how you use the time in your day to purposefully put good human stories in front of you, to put good church stories in front of you. To put, um, the Bible in front of you, to put other admirable things in front of you so that you'll have something to give praise to God about.

One of the ways Jesus says to do it is to go on a walk. Jesus is like, go on a walk and look at the flowers and look at the birds. He means this, folks. And Paul believed him. And Paul goes, read great stories of the people in the world that Mr. Rogers said, look for the helpers. Okay, this is the same advice in different language. What you fill your heart with will shape and rewrite the tablet. Paul says to the Corinthians, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we're wasting away, inwardly we're being renewed day by day. This comes by faith that the Spirit is in there, that Jesus and the Father have moved in there. So Paul says, set your hearts on things above. Where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things.

And I want, I want to suggest to you That the great example of Jesus in his passion is that he was obeying exactly these truths before Paul wrote them. When Jesus is in Gethsemane, And he's shaking the human fear. And he's sweating like great drops of blood falling from his forehead and his temples running into his eyes. And he's pleading with Peter and James and John. Stay awake. Stay with me. Watch with me. Jesus is experiencing the inner world of his human nature, leading him one direction. But his heart is discipled by these truths, by thinking about what is noble and right, by looking heavenward instead of towards the grave. And he says this most remarkable thing to the father, not my will. But yours be done. And as if that were not enough on the cross in anguish, his life blood flowing out of his body, struggling to breathe, How would you treat a person if your coffee was cold? How would you treat your child If they were, you know, too slow or rebellious, how would you speak to the coworker? That messed up the project. That delayed the account. That lost the sale. Right? Here's Jesus In the most compromised, painful, humiliating moment of his life, saying out of the fullness of a heart healed by God, Of a heart guided by God. Forgive them. They know not what they do.

This is what Paul means when he says, may God strengthen you with power through his Spirit and your inner being. It's possible for you and me. And not just when the coffee's cold or the sales falls through, but in the most humiliating moments of our life, to be formed by God in such a way that That by his Spirit in our inner being, Christ might dwell in our hearts through faith. And like Jesus, as his followers, a few steps behind him, we can say, not my will, but yours be done. Forgive them. They know not what they do.

Pray with me. Holy Father, leader of our hearts, creator of our emotions, of our thought world, Of everything that we hold dear and everything that we know. Holy father, lead us now. Examine our hearts. Search us, oh God. Know our hearts. Lead us in the way everlasting, Father. We pray that this will not come about by our own effort. We pray that it won't be our intelligence, our emotional, relational training. Any other asset or attribute that we bring to the table by which our hearts would be set in order but by the power of your Spirit and delighting in the goodness of the gospel of Jesus we pray that you would give us a vision of Jesus at your right hand. Having forgiven, having passed the ultimate test of forgiving those who were most cruel to him, who rejected him. And now being able to not only love from heaven, but to pray for humanity from your right hand. To know that he's interceding for his church, for the world, that he sends his Spirit to minister to this world and to outreach to it. We thank you, God. We pray you'd know our hearts. We pray that we would lift up and expose to the light of Jesus whatever might need to be seen. Transform us, change us, renew us, but not by our power, oh God, but by yours alone. In the name of Jesus, we pray, and together we say, amen.