Guard Your Heart: Filtering Ungodly Influences for Spiritual Health

Summary

This article compares water quality to spiritual heart health, showing why godly input and careful filtering matter. Just as polluted water harms the body, ungodly influences damage the heart. Scripture, Christian relationships, and the Holy Spirit nourish spiritual life, while discernment protects it. Believers must guard their hearts by filtering ungodly input and treasuring Jesus above all else, ensuring that God’s love flows freely through their lives.

Why Water Quality Illustrates Heart Health

My house has a well. For 74 years, that well has provided water dependably. The quantity of water has always been adequate. The quality of that water is vital to the health of all who live in the house. Not all water is trustworthy.

Many pollutants can render surface and groundwater undrinkable. They include pesticides, fertilizers, waste from sewers and other pipelines, improperly disposed hazardous waste, natural gas drilling, mining, quarrying, saltwater, landfills, military bases, and atmospheric contamination.1 

We can’t control the entry of most of these impurities into our water supply. Companies sell water filters to remove them.

Guard Your Heart from Ungodly Impurities

Likewise, we must be vigilant to prevent ungodly impurities from entering our hearts. As we shall see, we also need filters for that!

Godly Input Sustains Spiritual Life

Godly living depends on godly input. Let’s consider how to increase it. God’s love channeled into our hearts over time flows through us to others. Our purpose is to distribute God’s love based on our spiritual gifts.

Our first source of input is reading, meditating on, memorizing, and obeying the Scriptures. The first three prepare us to live according to the truth, which purifies us (1 Peter 1:22). These disciplines connect all the plumbing so that love flows increasingly from our lives (2 Thessalonians 1:3).

Our heart absorbs God’s love, and it trickles and then gushes from us to love others as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39), love other believers as Jesus loves us (John 13:34-35), and love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-44).

The Power of Godly Relationships

A second source of input is the believers’ positive influence. God’s love toward us channeled through them fortifies us as they honor us above themselves (Romans 12:10), serve us (Galatians 5:13), bear with us in love (Ephesians 4:2), and use spoken and written words to teach us. Their encouragement motivates us to loving actions that wouldn’t have happened without them (Hebrews 10:24).

The Holy Spirit as the Source of Love

Allowing the Holy Spirit to control us is a third source of godly input. The fruit of the Spirit, which includes love, is the natural result of the Holy Spirit of Jesus living His life through us (Galatians 5:22-23).

Filtering Ungodly Input to Protect the Heart

Because “Garbage in” inevitably becomes “garbage out,” filtering is essential, or ungodly input will feed stinking thinking and eventually morph into ungodly behavior. Ungodly influences are everywhere pressing against and seeking to conform us to their “attractive” God-defying shape (Romans 12:2). That is why Solomon tells us, “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life” (Proverbs 4:23 NLT).

Wise people control eye, ear, and relationship inputs. They don’t look at or listen to everything without discernment. They might grant full, partial, or no access. They recognize that their relationships are like multiple springs flowing into their hearts. Some feed their Christian life while others undermine its values to varying degrees.

For example, some who want to be our Facebook friend to take advantage of us are given no key to the heart, no access. Non-Christian friends might have partial access. We treat them kindly, but don’t share our innermost thoughts with them. We permit only a few responsible, trusted believers into the inner sanctum of our lives.

If we can pass the treasure test, we have guarded our hearts well. Our heart is healthy only if Jesus is our treasure (Matthew 6:21). Maintaining a healthy heart requires ruthlessly filtering out every competitor by taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ and His rule in our lives (2 Corinthians 10:5). Don’t let the guard fall asleep on the job.

1.     10 Potential Sources of Groundwater Pollution - SpringWell Water Filtration Systems

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