Christine Caine made a great analogy between our physical heart and our spiritual heart. She said, “Your physical heart muscle pumps and regulates your blood flow. That blood carries oxygen and nutrients throughout your body. If you exercise that muscle with cardio workouts and feed it healthy nutrients, it grows stronger. But let it languish and feed it junk food, and you know what happens: the arteries get clogged, and the muscle grows weak.
The same is true of your spiritual heart… What happens if you let your spiritual heart languish and you feed it junk food, the ‘earthly things’ that do not satisfy? It also gets clogged, grows weak, and sends toxicity pumping throughout your life.” How are you nourishing your spiritual heart?
We feed our spiritual heart with the things we allow our eyes to see and our minds to ingest. If we look at sinful images and situations, we begin to clog our spiritual arteries. The spirit of God cannot easily flow through us when we are not focused on Him. For most of us, our eyes are the primary gateway to our minds. What gets past the eyes embeds itself in our brains. Once there, it is difficult to remove. You can’t forget something on purpose. You can never un-see what has already been seen.
Craig Groeschel said, “Your life is always moving in the direction of your thoughts.” Once something is allowed to pass through your eyes, your mind begins to move you in that direction. If you see things not consistent with God’s Kingdom, you will be motivated and tempted to move towards those things. Our defense is to keep our eyes focused on God and the beauty of His character and Kingdom. This will take a lifetime of practice, but there is nothing better you could spend your life doing than disciplining yourself to look like Jesus.
The exercise your spiritual heart needs can be accomplished through prayer and studying God’s Word. Nothing strengthens our faith and our hearts like spending time with our Creator. Something impossible to put into words comes from focused time with Jesus. You will feel calm and peaceful in His presence. You’ll feel joy. In fact, you’ll feel all these things combined all at once. You will breathe easier and healthier after your time with God. I will warn you in advance, it is both intoxicating and addictive!
How is the health of your spiritual heart? While I am concerned about the health of your physical heart as well, the fact is each of our physical hearts will fail someday. In contrast, our spiritual heart beats forever. How well it beats is very much a matter of how we care for and condition it in our time on earth. We must spend our days nourishing our spiritual heart so we can present it to Christ when we meet Him face to face. We want to present our spiritual heart as a healthy, fine-tuned, and meticulously cared-for gift. Then we will hear His coveted words to us: “Well done my good and faithful servant (Matthew 25:23)”. Don’t you want to hear him say that to you? It all begins with how you nourish and exercise your spiritual heart. How are you caring for yours?