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PROGRAM D-8390
Is there any garbage in your heart? I’ve been exploring the topic of garbage this week—specifically, ear garbage, eye garbage, and heart garbage. The world around us is full of this garbage and you can become polluted with it before you even realize it.
As we’ve noted, ear garbage is the pollution you let into your heart through your ears, and eye garbage is what comes in through your eyes.
In closing this topic, I want to give you some encouragement as to how you can guard your heart from the world’s garbage—from the evil that your enemy, Satan, wants to put into your heart. As we’ve seen from Proverbs 4:23, our challenge is to guard our hearts because everything we do flows from our hearts—from that part of us where our emotions and desires dwell. But the good news is that you can keep out the garbage which will defile you if you’re willing to become intentional about it.
Proverbs 3:3 puts it this way: “Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.” I love this imagery of writing on the tablet of your heart. I write things down in order to remember them, don’t you? So, when you write on the tablet of your heart, you are putting reminders around you to let love and faithfulness be the core of your being, the center of your heart. Love and faithfulness—first to God and then to others—will keep your heart pure. So, write them on your heart—pray them into your heart.
Paul prayed for the Ephesians believers that “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people” (Ephesians 1:18). Enlightened hearts are those which know and practice truth and spurn the garbage of the world. Is your heart full of the hope that we have in Jesus—the riches that are yours because you are a joint heir with him to inherit all his riches? When that fills your heart, there is no room for heart garbage.
Please remember that guarding your heart from ear garbage and eye garbage will give you the purity of heart and life that will not only please God, but will bring great joy and peace to you.