Guard Your Heart, But Keep It Soft

Our Final Post in the Guarding your Heart series

You were never told to harden your heart. You were told to guard it.

We have walked quite a journey together through this Guard Your Heart series. We have spoken about betrayal, rejection, being misunderstood, hurt, the opinions of people, the thoughts we allow to remain and the things we replay long after the moment has passed. We have looked at what happens when something enters the heart and, perhaps more importantly, what happens when we allow it to stay there.

“Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” Proverbs 4:23 NKJV.

Everything flows from our hearts. How we speak, how we love, how we lead, how we respond, how we see people and even how we begin to see ourselves and God. That is why guarding our hearts matters so deeply. It is not pretending something did not hurt. It is not becoming so strong that nothing affects us. It is certainly not cutting everybody off and building walls so high that nobody can ever reach us again. Guarding our hearts means becoming intentional about what we allow to take root in the place everything else flows from.

Perhaps that is also why the enemy works so hard to wound the heart. If he cannot stop you, he will focus on bombarding you with thoughts and situations to have you continue walking while carrying an untreated wound.

If he cannot take away your calling, he will try to make you suspicious of everyone who comes close to it. If he cannot stop you from loving Jesus, he will try to make you afraid of loving people. If he cannot destroy your faith, disappointment may slowly begin lowering your expectation until you still believe God can, but somewhere inside you have stopped expecting that He will.

You still believe. You still serve. You still show up. You still do all the right things. But something inside your heart has changed…

And sometimes we wrongly call that wisdom.

When Guarding Becomes Hardening

There is a very important difference between a guarded heart and a hardened heart.

• A guarded heart has boundaries, while a hardened heart builds walls.
• A guarded heart forgives and learns, while a hardened heart remembers so that it can make sure it never feels that pain again.
• A guarded heart uses discernment, while a hardened heart can begin to see danger everywhere.
• A guarded heart understands that not everybody should have the same access, while a hardened heart eventually decides that nobody will ever have access again.

We can acknowledge that what happened was not okay without allowing what happened to decide who we become.

That distinction matters because pain can teach us things God never said.

• Betrayal can teach us that people cannot be trusted.
• Rejection can teach us that we are unwanted.
• Being misunderstood can teach us that we constantly need to explain ourselves.
• Hurt within the Body of Christ can begin distorting our view of Jesus because people represented Him poorly.
• Disappointment can teach us to stop expecting too much because hoping feels dangerous when we have been disappointed before.

But pain was never meant to become our teacher. Jesus is.

There are certainly things we learn through painful seasons, but the wound does not get to write the lesson. JESUS DOES. We take what happened to us right to our Lord, Saviour, Counsellor, Friend, and allow Him to show us:

• What is True,
• What needs healing,
• What needs changing,
• What needs forgiving, and
• What needs leaving behind.

What Have We Been Guarding?

Through this series we have walked through some of the places where our hearts are most vulnerable.

We have learned that:

• Betrayal does not have to become bitterness,

• Rejection does not have to become identity, and

• Being misunderstood does not mean we have to spend our lives trying to prove ourselves.

• Someone else’s failure does not change the faithfulness of God.
• A thought does not deserve our agreement simply because it entered our mind,
• And discernment does not require us to become suspicious of everyone around us.

Perhaps guarding our hearts has far less to do with keeping everything out than we sometimes think. Perhaps much of it is about becoming intentional about what we allow to remain.

• The offence came, but it does not have to remain.
• The rejection happened, but it does not get to name you.
• They misunderstood you, but you do not have to build your life around being understood.
• Someone broke your trust, but they do not get to decide whether you will ever trust another person again.
• You lost something you deeply valued, but loss does not get to tell you that God has nothing beautiful ahead of you.

This is where guarding our hearts becomes holy work.

Not because we deny what happened, minimise it or pretend we are unaffected, but because we refuse to give what happened authority over what happens next.

Perhaps the Real Test Is Tenderness

I have been thinking about this deeply. Perhaps one of the greatest signals of healing is not that the memory no longer hurts. Perhaps it is that after everything you have walked through, your heart is still tender.

• You can still love without becoming naive.
• You can still give without constantly keeping score.
• You can still receive correction without immediately hearing rejection.
• You can watch someone else being celebrated without wondering what their celebration says about your worth.
• You can enter a room without needing to work out who is for you and who is against you.
• You can obey God even when obedience requires vulnerability.
• You can still hope after disappointment.
• You can still believe there are beautiful people in the world after encountering some who wounded you.
• A tender heart still feels the sting. A hardened heart has taught itself not to be affected by it at all. Therefore, we will experience hurt in our hearts again, but if we steward it wisely, like we have learned, we will understand that it means our hearts are still tender…and that is important.

Truly understanding this is freedom.

The goal was never to become untouchable. Jesus certainly was not. He loved people who would leave Him. He washed Judas’ feet knowing exactly what Judas was going to do. He restored Peter after Peter denied Him. Jesus was never naive about people. He knew what was in their hearts, yet He did not allow what was in their hearts to contaminate what was in His.

That challenges me.

Jesus knew Judas was Judas. He knew Peter would deny Him. He knew crowds could celebrate Him one moment and reject Him another. Yet He remained who He was. He loved without surrendering Truth. He carried compassion without losing discernment. He had boundaries without bitterness. He STILL allowed Judas close to Him, He still shared every lesson, parable, part of Himself with him…although He KNEW He was going to betray Him to the point of the Cross…

That is the kind of heart I want.

• A heart that has learned, but has not hardened.
• A heart that has discernment, but is not suspicious.
• A heart that understands boundaries, but still has doors.
• A heart that is tender enough to love and strong enough to remain anchored in Truth.
• The heart of Jesus… Like John the Baptist, the cry of my heart is found in John 3:30 “More of You, Lord. Less of Me” or in another translation “He must increase, and I must decrease.” ALL of You, Lord, NONE of me!

Living Poetry on Fire

This is where we take what we have learned and actually live it.

Guarding our hearts requires us to become willing to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.

• When someone reminds me of a person who hurt me, do I automatically expect them to behave the same way?
• When someone corrects me, am I hearing what they are actually saying, or is rejection interpreting their words for me?
• When someone gets close, am I receiving them for who they are, or are they unknowingly paying the debt of someone who came before them?

We need to look honestly at our boundaries too:

• Have they brought healthy protection and peace, or have they slowly become a way of avoiding vulnerability altogether?
• Am I calling something discernment when it is actually fear?
• Have I stopped believing that God can bring trustworthy people into my life because somebody once proved themselves untrustworthy?

And perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask is this:

Jesus, is there anything in my heart that I have protected from You while telling myself I was protecting it from people?

Because sometimes we become so focused on guarding our hearts from everyone else that we accidentally guard parts of them from the very One who can heal them.

We have ONE heart. If that heart is hardened, it is hardened towards everyone and everything, including Jesus. We cannot soften and harden our hearts as we want. We only have one, and it is either tender, or it is hard. And under pressure, we will know which one it truly is.

Give Him access. Not the polished version of you. Not the answer you know you are supposed to give. Give Him the actual wound. The anger. The disappointment. The conversation you still replay when nobody else knows you are thinking about it. The name that still causes something inside you to shift. The questions you still have. The part that still hurts.

Do not try to meet Him where you pretend to be… He is waiting to meet you exactly where you truly are. No need to pretend anymore. He is still waiting for you with open arms.

Forgive again if you need to. Release again if you need to. Put a boundary back where it belongs if you need to. Ask for help if you need it. But do not let the wound become part of your identity.

You are allowed to heal. You are allowed to move forward. You are allowed to become soft again. Embrace it!

Be a Wildfire

And then we take it beyond ourselves, because freedom was never meant to stop with us.

• Become a safe person for someone else’s heart.
  • We live in a world where many people are terrified of being truly known, and sometimes they have very good reasons for feeling that way.
  • So, when somebody trusts you with their heart, handle it with the care Jesus does.
  • Do not demand access you have not earned.
  • Do not punish vulnerability.
  • Do not use someone’s honesty against them when you are hurt later.
  • Do not repeat what was entrusted to you and disguise it as concern.
  • Do not make somebody regret telling you the truth.

• Listen.
• Love.
• Speak truth when truth is needed.
• Correct with tenderness.
• Honour confidence.
• Respect boundaries.
• Give people room to grow.

And when someone comes to you wounded, resist the temptation to become their answer. Take them to Jesus.

Every time.

We are not trying to become the answer for people’s hearts. We are helping people discover the One who is.

Perhaps that is what wildfire looks like here:

• One healed heart helping another wounded heart discover that healing is possible.
• One free person refusing to reproduce what wounded them.
• One person deciding that bitterness will not travel any further through them.
• Rejection will not be reproduced.
• Gossip will not be repeated.
• Pain will not become a weapon.
• What happened to me will not become what flows from me.

And maybe that is where this entire Guard Your Heart journey brings us.

• Guard what enters your heart.
• Guard what stays there.
• Guard what you agree with.
• Guard what you replay.
• Guard what you allow pain to teach you.
• Pay attention to what begins growing inside you before anyone else can see the fruit of it.

But do not harden your heart.

The world does not need followers of Jesus who have become exceptionally good at protecting themselves but have forgotten how to love.
It needs people who can walk through fire without becoming fire that burns everybody around them.
People who carry scars without carrying poison. People with discernment without suspicion, boundaries without bitterness, wisdom without walls and tenderness without naivety.

Marilé Strauss

People who can look at what they have survived and say, “It hurt me. I learned through it. Jesus healed me. But it will not become me.”

Guard your heart fiercely.

Keep it tender.

Give Jesus access to all of it.

And then let what flows from it set other hearts on fire.

A prayer over you as we complete this series

Father, as we come to the end of this Guard Your Heart series, we bring our hearts back to You. Not the version we show people, not the parts we have already worked through, but all of it. Every place that has been bruised, every disappointment we have carried, every rejection that tried to rename us, every betrayal that changed the way we trust, every misunderstanding we wanted to defend, every offence we have replayed and every thought we entertained for longer than we should have. You see it all, and still You draw us closer. Thank You for not giving up on us, Jesus.

Search our hearts, Lord. If anything has taken root that You did not plant, expose it and help us remove it. Where bitterness has tried to grow, teach us to forgive. Where rejection has spoken louder than Your Word, remind us who we are in Christ. Where fear has disguised itself as discernment, teach us to recognise the voice of the Holy Spirit again. Where disappointment has lowered our expectation of Your goodness, restore our faith. Where boundaries have become walls, show us. Where we have allowed the actions of people to change the condition of our hearts, bring us back to You.

Father, we forgive those who hurt us. We release those who misunderstood us. We bless those who rejected us. We surrender the conversations we cannot change, the explanations we may never get to give and the apologies we may never receive. We refuse to carry yesterday into places You are calling us today. What happened to us will not become what flows from us.

Teach us to guard our hearts without hardening them. Give us wisdom without suspicion, discernment without fear, boundaries without bitterness and tenderness without naivety. May we become people who can walk through fire and still love, still hope, still trust You, still celebrate others, still forgive and still remain tender before You.

Holy Spirit, make us sensitive when something enters our hearts that does not belong there. Teach us to deal with offence before it grows roots, thoughts before they become agreements, comparison before it steals gratitude and fear before it begins directing our decisions. Let Your Word remain the loudest voice within us.

And may the fruit of this series not simply be something we have read. Let it become something we live. May our homes experience it. May our marriages and friendships experience it. May our workplaces and churches experience it. May the people around us encounter hearts that have been with Jesus.

Make us safe people for the hearts of others too. Let gossip stop with us. Let offence stop with us. Let rejection stop with us. Let unhealthy cycles stop with us. Teach us to carry people’s vulnerability with honour, to speak Truth in love, to correct without wounding and to point people continually back to Jesus rather than ourselves.

Above everything, Father, keep our hearts Yours. Give us clean hands and pure hearts. Keep us teachable, tender and free. Let everything that flows from us increasingly look like YOU.

We place our hearts into Your hands again, trusting You with what has been, what is and everything still to come.

Guard them. Heal them. Shape them. And use them for Your glory.

In Jesus’ Name,

Amen.

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