Guard the Spring

Proverbs 4:23. Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

The Hebrew word for heart does not mean feelings, or not mainly. It means the center of a person: thought, will, desire, memory, all gathered in one place. When Proverbs says guard it, the picture is of a spring in dry country. If the spring is fouled, every stream from it carries the fouling downstream. If it is kept clean, the whole valley drinks.

Above all else. The verse ranks this task above the others in the chapter, above listening to instruction, above avoiding the path of the wicked, because those depend on it. A guarded heart makes the rest possible.

On a Sunday this is a good verse to carry into worship. Worship is one of the ways the spring is cleaned. Confession removes what has fouled it. The word and the table refill it. And then the week's streams, the conversations and decisions and hours at work, run clearer because of what happened at the source.