My Heart is Steadfast, O God!
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Psalm 57:7
Psalm 57:7
7 My heart is steadfast, O God,
my heart is steadfast!
I will sing and make melody!
8 נָ֘כֹ֤ון לִבִּ֣י אֱ֭לֹהִים נָכֹ֣ון לִבִּ֑י אָ֝שִׁ֗ירָה וַאֲזַמֵּֽרָה׃
The heart is an organ that weighs about ten to twelve ounces, it weights about one third of 1% of your body’s weight.
Yet it pumps through itself forty-five pounds of blood per minute, 2700 pounds per hour, and 32.4 tons per day. It is a muscle that never rests except between beats.
Every thirty seconds, all the blood in the body passes through the heart. It has a grip greater than that of one's fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold an average of ten ounces of blood, which is pumped out at each beat.
What a miracle is this little organ. It does about one-fifth of the mechanical work of the body and exerts enough energy each hour to lift its own weight 13,000 feet into the air.
To send the blood as far away as one's two feet, the heart must overcome a resistance of 12,600 pounds.
While the mind and and thought are mentioned 275 times combined in the Bible the heart is mentioned 954 times.
That being said we shouldn’t read into this that God isn’t concerned with the mind as much as with the emotions. The Hebrew concept of ‘the heart’ included the mind rather than excluding it.
לֵב n.m. (f., fr. influence of נֶפֶשׁ) inner man, mind, will, heart — inner part, mids
The bottom line is - just as the heart as an organ is utterly essential to the life and health of your body, your heart/inner man is utterly essential to your spiritual wellbeing.
Modern body builders push their physical body’s to the absolute limit in order to produce extraordinary levels of muscle mass. In order to reach the top of the game many competitive body builders use performance enhancing drugs to give them an edge. But it comes at a cost - a frighteningly high percentage of professional body builders in recent decades have died young from heart attacks. Despite looking in peak physical condition externally most bedy builders are actually chronically unhealthy owing to the strain being put on their hearts.
Your health is dependent upon the condition of your heart. Though many project an image of confidence, strength and prowess out to the world, they are desperately sick in the heart and that sickness eventually gets the better of them.
The health of your inner man determines how weak or strong you truly are in life.
Put two people in a room together, one has a weak heart and the other is healthy. Looking at them you might not be able to tell the difference; they may look pretty much the same to the naked eye. But get them to race one another and you’ll quickly find out who’s heart is healthy and who’s isn’t. The health of your heart is revealed only in testing.
David’s testing in the cave of Adullam revealed the condition of his heart; His heart was steadfast, fixed, established, prepared for the trial.
Your trials are there to reveal the condition of your heart. Trials introduce you to yourself!
19 As in water face reflects face,
so the heart of man reflects the man.
You are your heart. You are the person that shows up when things don’t go your way! It’s a sobering thought because I don’t always appreciate the guy who shows up when inconveniences happen - he is sort of short on patience and prone to throw hissy fits! But thanks be to God for those moments because I’m brought face to face with my weakness and can look to Him for healing.
3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Suffering reveals the heart and the heart reveals the man.
There has never been a time at which people have been more able to hide their true self from view. Social media tempts us all to turn ourselves into products to be consumed. We project a particular image out into the world and work hard to mask any marks or blemishes in our image. But the heart will always reveal who you really are, it will always remind you of how far you’ve come in your walk with Jesus!
23 Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
As Spurgeon famously said - your heart is a reservoir. It’s the reservoir of your life. Your desires, your choices, your behaviour flows out of your heart. So we are encouraged to guard it, to keep it with all vigilance. To check what’s going in to it, and test the purity of what’s coming out of it.
5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
David’s test in the cave of Adullam revealed the condition of his heart; his heart was steadfast. It was rooted, establised and fixed.
What did David mean by this? What is it to have a heart that is steadfast? Our best reference to find out what he meant is David himself. He writes of the steadfast heart in Psalm 112:7
7 He is not afraid of bad news;
his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.
So the one who’s heart is steadfast is someone who is not afraid of bad news because they are trusting in the Lord. Steadfastness in the inner man brings with it a confidence, a fearlessness.
16 As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling. 17 She followed Paul and us, crying out, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” 18 And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.
19 But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. 20 And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. 21 They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. 23 And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. 24 Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.
25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them,
What power can steady that fluttering, wayward, agitated thing, a human heart? The way to keep light articles fixed on deck amidst rolling seas and howling winds, is to lash them to something fixed; and the way to steady a heart is to bind it to God. Built into the Rock, the building partakes of the steadfastness of its foundation. Knit to God, a heart is firm.
Knit yourself to God!
Has God given you a chance to look in the mirror this week? Has there been a moment when you caught a glimpse of the condition of your heart? What was it like? Were you encouraged by what was within or did you see room for improvement?
Two sure signs that your heart that needs attention is:
a) constant worrying about the future
b) you feel you have little to be thankful for
This morning is an opportunity for a little heart MOT - a time to lift up the bonnet and see how you’re doing. God doesn’t condemn us for our weaknesses, He comes to heal our weaknesses, He came to bind up our broken hearts. And maybe some of us today need to ask for His healing touch, maybe others need to ask for help to forgive. Holding on to unforgiveness and resentment is another cause of an unhealthy heart.
The symptoms of a steadfast heart
Fearlessness
Praise in suffering
Because David’s heart was steadfast he sang and made melody in the cave, he turned that cave into a cathedral. A heart that is steadfast
will praise God gladly
Will praise God openly in song
Will praise Him out of overflow (spontaneously)
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