devotional

The Battle for Your Heart

 Michael Zigarelli

click here for a printer-friendly version

Above all else, guard your heart,

for it is the wellspring of life

Proverbs 4:23

As I’m sure you know, this is not a call to a healthy heart regimen of eating right, exercising, and getting enough fiber. It’s a call to something even more important: A transformed life, from the inside out. It’s a call to get the internals right first so the externals will be right.

Throughout the Bible, its authors use “heart” as a metaphor to describe the innermost core of a person—his or her essence which governs every attitude, priority, and choice. For example, we read in Exodus that because of his hardened and calloused heart, Pharaoh refused to free the Israelite slaves (4:21), refused to listen to Moses and Aaron (7:3-4), and later pursued Israel into the Red Sea (14:4). In 1 Kings, we read that after Solomon received a “wise and discerning heart” (1 Kings 3:12), he made a decision so shrewd that we’re still talking about it (the threat to split the baby in half, 1 Kings 3:16-28). And most notably, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus tells us directly about the connection between our “heart” and our actions: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander” (Matthew 15:19; cf. also Mark 7:18-23).

Today, our term of choice for this innermost core is not “heart,” but “worldview.” The concept is the same, though, and it’s a profound truth that we simply must remember: As we think, so we do. To live christianly, we must think christianly. Or, as Nancy Pearcey says so well: “morality is always derivative—it stems from an underlying worldview.” [1]

This is why God cares so much about what’s at our core. It’s “the wellspring of life,” according to the proverb, or, as translated in other Bible versions, it’s the “source of life” (HCSB) or “where life starts” (The Message). That’s why God urges us to “guard our heart”—our worldview—from conformity and corruption. When we don’t, we drift. 

That’s not a difficult thing to understand, but guarding our heart can be a very difficult thing to do in this day and age. Whether you realize it or not, there is a daily battle going on for your “heart,” a battle to secularize your worldview and conform you to the culture, and stakes couldn’t be higher. And that conformity doesn’t just happen when we’re consciously polluting ourselves with exposure to unhealthy messages. More frequently and more insidiously, the slow but steady transformation happens without our knowledge or our permission.

It can happen when we see dozens of ads per day implying the good life comes from owning more stuff. It can happen when we listen to music whose lyrics normalize profanity, drug use, and casual sex. It can happen when we watch television shows that somehow get us to cheer for revenge, deception, and murder. It can happen when Hollywood gets us to empathize with a movie character whose lifestyle dishonors God.

It can happen when we hear pop stars, politicians, and professors insist that people have the right to do whatever makes them happy. It can happen when we read advice columns that implore us to first “look out for number one.”

It can happen when too many of the people we hang around with think of table prayers as “talking to your plate.” It can happen when TV talk show hosts and best-selling authors assure us that everyone goes to heaven. It can even happen in church when a pastor preaches low-cost Christianity, fearing that if he’s too tough on people, they won’t come back next week.

Most germane to the Christianity 9 to 5 audience, the transformation from a Biblical to a secular worldview can happen through management training that takes as its starting point that profit is paramount. It can happen after years of working in a place where the norm is to base decisions on “what works” or “what’s provable,” rather than on what’s right. And it can happen when too many of the management books, magazines and Web sites we read assume that our Sunday God is not relevant on Monday.

You see, when we live and work in a secularized culture, the transformation of our worldview—of our most basic assumptions about who God is and how we should live—happens invisibly and it happens inevitably…unless, that is, we actively guard against it.

What does that mean in practical terms? In one sense, forewarned is forearmed. If we remain aware of the threat to our worldview, we’ll be more likely to resist some of the secular brainwash. But for most of us, awareness won’t be enough. For most of us, guarding our heart will mean being intentional about the guarding.

One way to do this is by leveraging this same cause-and-effect process to our advantage. What I mean is this: If our environment can powerfully pull our worldview in a secular direction, it can also pull it in a sacred direction. We just need to make some adjustments in our lifestyle so that we take in more of the right messages and fewer of the wrong ones.

We can, for example, get in the habit of surrounding ourselves with more wholesome music and of watching less toxic TV shows and movies. We might make a practice of downloading Christian-oriented podcasts and books and listening to those during our commute. More broadly, we can make wiser choices about everything we access on the Internet, as well as about what we read, about the conversations we have, and about the company we keep.

If possible, we might choose Christian education for ourselves and our kids, rather than secular education. We can go to Christian conferences and retreats, not just the standard professional conferences in our field. And most importantly, we can spend lots of time at a solid Bible-believing church and with the God whom they serve.

There are other things we can do, too, like practice the longstanding spiritual disciplines that ultimately make us more like Jesus, but the main point here is that cultural conditioning flows both ways. It can help us as well as hurt us. If we’ll get intentional about exposing ourselves to a healthier culture, we’ll maintain a healthier “heart.”

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. Guarding our heart does not mean escaping from the secular culture and insulating ourselves in a Christian bubble. To be effective witnesses, as God wants us to be, we need to be in the world but not of it. So guarding our heart doesn’t mean giving away our TV, canceling our subscription to Harvard Business Review, quitting our job to work in the church, or telling our non-Christian friends to take a hike. It does mean, though, that we recognize we’re in a daily battle, that the enemy is powerful and invisible, and that to win this battle we must “above all else” co-labor with God to maintain a Biblical worldview.

Michael Zigarelli is an Associate Professor at Messiah College and the editor of Christianity9to5.org.