Guard your heart

One of the wisest men to ever live on this earth has some advice for us all: buy low and sell high.

No, that’s not it. Perhaps you should buy low and sell high, but the actual advice I refer to is from Solomon, written to his children. He told them guard your heart. Specifically, the advice says this:

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

A few days ago, my wife and I finally watched the newest Mission Impossible movie. It’s been out for a while, and though we wanted to see it on “the big screen” with big sound, it was still fun at home. (Spoiler alert: the good guys win.)

The plot of the movie concerns a rogue AI called The Entity that is going to take over the world because, you know, that’s what rogue AI’s do. (Not to say there is nothing to fear about AI, but that’s a whole other article.)

Anyway, to effectively take over the world, it seems, The Entity wants access to “The Doomsday Vault” in South Africa. That vault, like The Entity, only exists in the movie.

The idea of the vault, though, is that it is the repository for all human knowledge. If there were to be a near total annihilation of mankind (like in the time of Noah, which they actually refer to in the movie!), history and wisdom would still be extant.

The Great Flood

Back to Noah and his family. The Bible says that in the days of Noah, things had gotten pretty bad on earth vis-à-vis man’s relationship with God. Here’s how bad it had become:

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.” (Genesis 6:5-8)

So mankind then (except for Noah) sounds pretty much like The Entity. Apparently AI is not required for evil to make its way throughout the earth.

Here’s a key verse from the quote above that we sometimes gloss over. That’s partly because we want to get to the good stuff and partly because it’s just a little uncomfortable. Get ready… read carefully:

God saw… that every intention of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually.

Who is The Entity now? Us. Or at least the way The Entity (apparently created from Anti-God material, which appeared in an earlier Mission Impossible movie) is portrayed. Every thought is self-serving.

Have you ever had a day like that? I know it doesn’t say “self-serving” in the text, it says “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” But what does that look like in real life? It looks like my primary focus — perhaps my only focus — is me and how I can, by any means, advance myself.

How does that happen?

You might have noticed that people can sometimes be a tiny bit selfish. My little dictionary gives this definition for selfish, just so we’re talking about the same thing: concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. All you have to do to witness some of that in action is drive on a freeway, check out at a big grocery store, or go pretty much anywhere else where people are “in a hurry.”

Thanks to Amazon, one area of extreme selfishness has diminished greatly: parents shopping for that year’s special toy for their child for Christmas. Fights would break out over who got the last toy. And lest you think that would only be the men, I’ve heard similar stories about women shopping in Filene’s Basement.

Here’s the question: have you ever seen behavior like that in yourself? Have you ever been tempted to behave like that? Of course you have. So have I. So have we all.

Perhaps you overcame it early and haven’t been selfish since you were two. Good for you! But suppose, like most of us, that selfish thing pops up every now and then. That is one place where you really need to guard your heart.

Selfishness left on its own can grow, and it can eventually become a habit. Once it is in that state, it is hard to eradicate. So guard your heart. Get rid of it if it is there, and don’t ever let it in again.

Guard against this, too…

While selfishness is dangerous, I think of it as a child of pride. I am far from the first to suggest that selfishness and pride go together. One may manifest before the other in different individuals, but they feed each other.

Pride is about glorifying yourself, while selfishness is about gratifying yourself. As you read that sentence, you will know whether either or both of those have their claws in you.

Pride, by the way, is the basis for a lot of evil things, and I’m guessing you could name many of them. For now, though, let’s finish with this:

How to guard your heart

You might think that guarding your heart requires the skill and cunning of Ethan Hunt and his team, because it is an impossible mission. The good news is, this is something you can do. Others can help, of course, and you can help others. Either way, this is how you do it:

You guard your heart by replacing the negative, the self-centered, the destructive, the immoral, and the untrue, and you do that by focusing on the true, the good, that which builds up, the moral, and on what is good for others.

Though you shun evil, you will still see it. Counter it with good, and it will not be able to get in. If it does, it will not find a welcome environment.

Guard your heart, and guard it well. A good life depends on it.

Do good. It’s in you, and in your heart.