Above all else, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do. – Prov 4:23

The Puritans coined the phrase "heart work" to describe what they believed to be the most important task of Christians – to guard our hearts, keeping them holy to God, and dependent on Him.

In sending revival, God is calling Christians to greater holiness.

I sense many of us receiving this call, which is why I have been led to write this article. He has assigned us our part, which lies in diligent heart work.

It is important because being a Christian is primarily a matter of the heart. God’s greatest commandment is for us to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (in that order – Matt 12:30). We are to believe with our hearts (Rom 10:10), rend our hearts (Joel 2:13), circumcise our hearts (Deut 10:16), purify our hearts (James 4:8)!

Keeping our hearts right before God is to be the main business of our lives, more important than anything else, including the pursuit of money, health and happiness. Indeed, even if we are involved in a lot of Christian ministry or even exercising spiritual gifts, but fail to guard our hearts, it would all amount to nothing.

Simply speaking, a man’s heart is where his thoughts, emotions and desires reside, that is, it consists of who he is, and his deepest desires.

Although most of us like to think we are rational creatures, the truth is that we are often ruled more by our hearts than by our heads. Many of the things we do are based on irrational decisions, influenced more by passion and desire than reason. If our hearts are right, we will do the right things. If our hearts are in the wrong place, we will do the wrong things.

It is horrible.

We are all sinners. Some of us sin openly, not being ashamed of what we do. Most of us are careful to be respectable outwardly, but inwardly we are full of pride, lust, envy, covetousness, hatred and so on, deceiving ourselves that we are without sin. Whether we sin secretly or openly, God – who looks at our hearts – sees our sinfulness and our failure to fulfill His law. As Luther puts it, in his Preface to Romans:

He gives us new hearts.

Jesus told Nicodemus: "You must be born again." To be born again is to have God give us new hearts together with the Holy Spirit, through faith in Christ Jesus. He takes out our stony hearts (cold, dead and hardened against Him – Zech 7:12) and replaces them with hearts of living flesh, which love Him and yearn to know Him.

He Himself will circumcise our hearts so that we truly become the spiritual children of Abraham.

With our new hearts, we can finally fulfill God’s law.

Luther explains it this way:

Although our hearts are renewed by faith, our old corrupt human natures remain with us. Make no mistake – in Christ we are indeed new creatures, except that we still inhabit our old natural bodies (which love comfort and pleasure), and still think with our old natural minds (which are entrenched in carnal thought patterns).

We are to reckon ourselves as dead to sin, but our flesh – crucified on the cross – will refuse to die quietly. Crucifixion is a slow and painful death, accompanied by violent struggles. Imagine, if you will, your old self up on the cross (looking somewhat like Gollum, perhaps) – still muttering curses, taunting you and trying to tempt you. The corrupt human nature within us remains Satan’s ally against us to the end, and can sometimes show surprisingly great remaining strength.

One last quote from Luther:

"Faith doesn't so free us from sin that we can be idle, lazy and self-assured, as though there were no more sin in us. Sin is there, but, because of faith that struggles against it, God does not reckon sin as deserving damnation. Therefore we have in our own selves a lifetime of work cut out for us; we have to tame our body, kill its lusts, force its members to obey the Spirit and not the lusts. We must do this so that we may conform to the death and resurrection of Christ and complete our baptism, which signifies a death to sin and a new life of grace. Our aim is to be completely clean from sin and then to rise bodily with Christ and live forever."

What has changed, then, with our new hearts? Where once we lived as though God did not exist, we now find in our hearts a great love for Him and a yearning for His holiness. Where once we loved sin (or at least, easily rationalized it away), it now pains our hearts and distresses us greatly, and so we strive against sin. Where once we loved ourselves and prided ourselves on our self-sufficiency, we now resist the flesh as we see and acknowledge before God our corrupt human nature and utter helplessness against sin.

It’s not only alright, it’s expected of us as Christians! The Bible is full of exhortations to struggle against sin. John Wesley started the Holy Club while in Oxford, with the declared aim of leading a disciplined life of purity and holiness. The Puritans were so called because of their desire to keep their hearts pure before God. James tells us to cleanse our hands and purify our hearts (James 4:8), because only those with clean hands and pure hearts can stand before God (Psalm 24:4). We need to be very serious about sin, and diligent in our efforts to purify and guard our hearts, and to do good works.

At this point I should emphasize that without faith in Christ and a new heart, all our efforts are futile. Christ’s death on the cross is all we will ever need to be justified before God, and it is the Holy Spirit working in us which sanctifies us. If everything depends on God, you may ask, why is it we have to guard our hearts? Simply because God, in His wisdom, has also decreed that there should also be human responsibility and effort.

We are to work out our own salvation, because it is God who works in us! There is no contradiction, because without God first working in us, we would have no heart for the task. But with new hearts which have been made willing and able to do God’s will, it is love for God which inspires us. This is a much more powerful motivating force than mere duty or fear of punishment. Jacob worked seven years for the right to marry Rachel, and it seemed to him but a few days, because of his love for her (Gen 29:20). So it will be for us when we serve God joyfully, with loving hearts. The Bible tells us that our hearts are filled with this love for God only by the presence of the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us (Rom 5:5).

The fruit of our efforts will inevitably fall far short of God’s standards, but just as we give our children an "A for Effort" even when their performances are lacking, so God looks at our hearts to see if our actions spring from faith and a genuine desire to honour Him (or otherwise), and rewards us accordingly. This is what living in grace is all about.

We can only guard our hearts if we know what the state of our hearts are in the first place. God, who searches all men’s hearts, will reveal to us our wicked ways if we ask Him. Our job then is to cast these sins out of our hearts. This is the "hard work" part of heart work, because our darling vices and secret idols all have to go. We all know that it is sometimes easier to become a missionary in Africa or be burned at the stake than to let go of our precious sins, or "my preciousss", as Gollum would put it. But let go we must, if we are to be accepted of God.

We are to examine ourselves, not only for sins to cast out, but to test whether our hearts have been truly renewed and our faith is genuine. Jesus warned that not everyone who professed Him as Lord would be saved, but only those who did the works of His Father in heaven (Matt 7:21). When our hearts are right, good works will naturally follow, and these works will prove our faith (James 2:18). This evidence is mainly for our benefit rather than that of onlookers, that we may have in our own hearts the assurance of salvation.

In the course of researching this article, I was astounded when I saw the set of rules drawn up by John Wesley for the conduct of his small group meetings. I discovered, to my delight, that the rules seemed designed explicitly for members to help each other in the task of self-examination. They were to ask each other (and honestly answer) searching questions such as:

It is only when we ask ourselves such hard questions that we can effectively know our hearts and guard them. In fact, sometimes it is too difficult and painful for us to ask these questions of ourselves, which is why we need to be in small groups of fellow Christians who will ask these questions of us, and demand an accountable answer. Perhaps we should return to these practices.

We are to guard our hearts against temptation. It is useful to understand how temptation works, because we are at war with sin, and a crucial element in any warfare is to know our enemy. The enemy (our corrupt nature) lies within ourselves, ever willing to respond to satan, who tempts us from without.

Temptation begins as an unbidden thought, or a fleeting sight of something, that stirs up our desire. If we entertain it, the desire grows and becomes stronger, and turns into lust (a word I use in its broadest sense – referring not only to sexual lust, but also pride, desire for revenge, material covetousness and so on). Lust, as we all know, very soon becomes irresistible, and results in sinful action.

When weeds first appear in a garden, it is a simple matter to pluck them out with thumb and forefinger. If they are allowed to grow, the gardener finds himself wrestling with thorns and deep roots, and may damage the surrounding plants, in his efforts to remove overgrown weeds.

In the same way, the best and easiest time to eliminate sin is to uproot temptation when it first springs up, refusing to entertain it and turning our backs on it. If we wait until it has matured into full-grown lust, we will have a tough battle on our hands, and might sustain spiritual scars which may never heal.

To guard our hearts, therefore, is to be ever watchful for the beginnings of any sin and temptation, and uprooting them out of our hearts before they have a chance to become entrenched there. This is best done in an attitude of prayer. Charles Wesley said it best:

Apart from being watchful, we are also instructed to pray, lest we enter into temptation. Always keeping close to God will help us guard our hearts, and when we are tempted, we can immediately cry out for help from the One who was tempted, yet remained without sin.

God’s Word is an exceedingly powerful weapon we have been given to guard our hearts. How do we hide it in our heart? Through prayerful and diligent reading, study and meditation of the Bible. This may seem like hard work (and sometimes it is), but if our hearts are right, it will usually be a great delight, as the whole of Psalm 119 proclaims.

In this respect, I would like to highly recommend downloading and installing the Online Bible, which is a free software available from www.onlinebible.net. It has revolutionized my study of the Bible for the last few years, with searching, cross referencing, in-depth commentaries, topical studies and different translations all available with a single click of the mouse.

The origin of sin is self-love – the I, Me, Myself exalting itself above God. Where hearts are not changed, self-indulgence remains more important than obeying and submitting to God, and self-pride robs God of the glory due to Him.

We must guard our hearts against an attitude of self-indulgence, because to live the life of Christ is to be completely selfless as He was. His main desire was to do the will of His Father in Heaven, not His own. In the same way our lives should be focused on pleasing God rather than on self-pleasing – seeking out the things which give us human pleasure. We are to die to ourselves, so that it is no longer the I, Me, Myself who dictates everything we do, but God.

A good way to examine ourselves in this matter is to search our hearts for any desires which we would not willingly give up if God were to so command. Is He our one desire?

It is not a joyless life I am talking about. When we lose our life (by denying and dying to self) we shall find it (eternal life). Our desire for God will be fulfilled beyond measure, and we will be filled with the joy which every Christian should have.

All this is actually nothing new. Christianity was an "experimental religion" to many of our spiritual forefathers such as the Puritans and early Methodists. The word "experimental" here is not used in the sense of trying out something new to see if you like it (as in "experimenting with drugs and sex"), but in the sense of testing a belief to prove it to be true (as in "the experiment successfully proved the law of gravity").

We are to look for personal proofs and evidences in ourselves that God has indeed changed our hearts. The proof would be in changed lives – the fruit of the spirit, personal assurance of salvation, and holiness from a pure heart. While it is God who began and will finish this work of making us holy, we are yet to strain as hard as we can to reach this goal ourselves, as Paul did. Heart work is hard work, but it is the most important work. God has given each of us a new heart, and we must keep our heart with all diligence, for from it flow the issues of life.

I am indebted to the following authors and their writings, whom I have quoted and whose ideas are expressed in this article. These are all available online, for free, and I would highly recommend them to all Christian brothers and sisters.

Martin Luther – Preface to Romans
A W Pink – Practical Christianity
John Flavel – On keeping the heart