The importance and necessity of making this our great and main business will manifestly appear, in that the honor of God, the sincerity of our profession, the beauty of our conversation, the comfort of our souls, the improvement of our graces, and our stability in the hour of temptation, are all wrapt up in and dependent on our sincerity and care in the management of this work.
John Flavel
The Heart, the Soul of Man
“There is reared up in the midst of man’s soul, a most famous and stately palace: for strength, it may be called a castle; for pleasantness, a paradise; and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the world. This palace the King intends but for Himself alone, and not another with Him, and He commits the keeping of that palace day and night to the men of the town” (John Bunyan, The Holy War).
God, our Creator, has formed man with not only a physical body, but within that magnificent body is an inner realm even more significant, glorious and powerful than the body which contains it. This stately palace, the soul of man, was designed for habitation by God and not for any other. And so it was in the beginning until that tragic incident we know as the fall of man. In the fall, invaders laid claim to this domicile and have wreaked havoc in what was once a tranquil, pleasant place.
Since the Fall Man Has Had a Restless Heart
“Ever since the days of St. Augustine, it has been a proverb that God has made the heart of a man for Himself, and that the heart of man finds no true rest till it finds its rest in God” (Alexander Whyte).
All human beings are born with a void in their hearts. The problem is not with the desire and longing to fill this void, but with in what or whom we try to find satisfaction. Our hearts become attached to wrong things. We make idols of everything—good and bad. What are some of these idols? We each have erected and bowed down to various ones. For one person his career has consumed his time and attention; another has tried to satisfy himself with material gain, and for another even his spouse and children have ascended the throne and sit as the adored object.
C.S. Lewis said, “Idols always break the hearts of their worshippers.” As large as the world and the universe are, they cannot satisfy our hearts for the void in our hearts is still larger and our hearts long to be filled. Only the Creator God, who made our hearts for His home, can fill our hearts to overflowing.
Since the Fall Man Has Had a Wicked Heart
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” (Jeremiah 17:9)
“There is nothing one half so worthy of abhorrence as the human heart. God spares from all eyes but His own, that awful sight, a human heart; and could you and I but see our heart, we should be driven mad, so horrible would be the sight.” (Charles Spurgeon, New Park Street Pulpit, Vol. 1, p. 44)
How are we to get our desperately wicked, wild hearts to bow down, adore, and worship Him who is altogether lovely? How are we to educate our ignorant hearts that in Christ alone is “fullness of joy, pleasures forever” (Psalm 16:11)? First, there must be a work of regeneration by the Holy Spirit (new life is imparted). All men are spiritually dead until God graciously gives spiritual life to those He has chosen from the foundation of the world. With this new life comes the ability to express faith in Christ’s work on the cross, His atoning sacrifice for sin, and His perfect obedience to the law on behalf of His children. As with any living, growing entity, this new spiritual life must be nurtured. Thus we have the beginning of the lifelong process of sanctification.
The Need to Keep the Unruly Heart
What does it mean to keep the heart? Keeping the heart requires self-examination. Even though the Holy Spirit has regenerated us and our hearts now have the seed of grace planted in them, there are still many weeds (sinful motives, sinful thoughts, the world with its many vain enticements, the devil and his plots and schemes to make us sin) that try to stunt the growth of grace. As growing, cultivating, and maintaining a garden is hard work and time-consuming, so is this business of keeping the heart. At the end of the summer a garden which has been neglected will produce many ugly weeds and little that is of use.
Within the context of the absolute necessity of keeping our hearts, we need to realize the primacy of the mind. We cannot know or embrace that which has not first passed through our minds. I cannot say I love someone or something about whom I know nothing. However, this is not to say that only mental assent to a fact is important. If we are to live holy lives, the road traveled must be first to our minds (knowing what is right), then to our hearts (embracing truth), and then to our wills (actions: doing what is right). Though it is often a thousand miles from our minds to our hearts, it is most assuredly a tiny step from our affections to our obedience. May the Holy Spirit empower us speedily to travel those thousand miles by enlightening our minds and enabling us to embrace and submit to the truth.
Why We Fail to Examine Our Hearts
While keeping the heart involves being students of the Bible and our own hearts, we often find truancy rampant among us dull scholars. Why this aversion to calling a conference with ourselves?
The Time Factor. The unseen is as real and as important as the seen world, but the physical world intrudes and often dominates our lives. We all struggle with busyness and feel the need to be productive. In today’s society doing is valued and sitting and reflecting is not valued. Which is better? Scripture gives us Jesus’ assessment in the example of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). The inner life must be looked after, and this requires time. It takes time to examine our hearts—to make judgments about ourselves, to examine our motives, to examine what we really love and to build a relationship with God.
The Guilt Factor. There is surely a hesitancy to examine our hearts because we don’t like what we find. We are all naturally prone to flee from ourselves, and we desire to converse with our own hearts as seldom and as little as possible. There is a lurking suspicion in our minds that all is not right there, that if we were to search ourselves very closely we would discover something that would be painful to us. This tempts us to neglect self-examination, even to hate it, as much as the criminal dislikes his day in court when his crimes are exposed. Therefore we have much need to be reminded of what we are, to have the light of God’s word set up before us to show us the state of our inward man, and to have the Holy Spirit say with conviction, “Thou art the man.”
The Ignorance Factor. Toothless and timid generalities make up most of modern-day Christian publications, whether it be magazines or books. The shallow, feel-good preaching of our day disturbs few, if any, consciences. The holy thunder of God’s law, striking and piercing the heart like hot lightning, is absent; and both pastor and congregation often sleep on in undisturbed, vain security. Surely Simple, Sloth, and Presumption from Pilgrim’s Progress give an accurate picture of too many in the church today. But let us look back at William Lord Russell’s advice to his son for a lesson in self-examination, as recorded by Whyte:
Fail not, what employment soever you have, every night, as in the presence of God and His holy angels, to pass an inquisition on your soul, what ill it hath done, what good it hath left undone; what slips, what fall, it has had that day; what temptations have prevailed upon it, and by what means or after what manner. Ransack every corner of thy dark heart; and let not the least peccadillo, or kindness to a sin, lurk there; but bring it forth, bewail it, protest against it, detest it, and scourge it by a severe sorrow. Thus, each day’s breach between God and your soul being made up, with more quiet and sweet hope thou mayest dispose thyself to rest. Certainly at last this inquisition, if steadily pursued, will vanquish all customary sins, whatever they may be. I speak it upon this reason, because I presume thou wilt not have the face to appear before God every night confessing the same offense; and thou wilt forbear it, lest thou mayest seem to mock God or despise Him, which is dreadful but to imagine. (Alexander Whyte, The Duty of Prayer, p. 241)
With such keen instruction, even the dullest are relieved of their ignorance on this subject.
A Caveat—Legalism
As with all godly practices, Satan tries to sabotage and destroy this one. The good and right practice of keeping the heart can easily turn to legalism if done from a wrong motive. We are often lured into legalism by thinking that if we do this correct deed or that correct practice we will cause God to accept and love us. However, ours is a relationship with a gracious Father who has made our justification and acceptance with Him to be bound up in Christ’s meritorious work on our behalf. Because of what Christ has done we now obey from a motivation of thanksgiving, gratitude, and love.
Maurice Roberts explains this correct motivation as follows:
Ecstasy and delight are essential to the believer’s soul and they promote sanctification. We were not meant to live without spiritual exhilaration, and the Christian who goes for a long time without the experience of heart-warming will soon find himself tempted to have his emotions satisfied from earthly things and not, as he ought, from the spirit of God. The soul is so constituted that it craves fulfillment from things outside itself and will embrace earthly joys for satisfaction when it cannot reach spiritual ones. . . The believer is in spiritual danger if he allows himself to go for any length of time without tasting the love of Christ and savoring the felt comforts of a Savior’s presence. When Christ ceases to fill the heart with satisfaction, our souls will go in silent search of other lovers. . . By the enjoyment of the love of Christ in the heart of a believer we mean an experience of the “love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, which is given to us” (Rom 5:5). . . Because the Lord has made Himself accessible to us in the means of grace, it is our duty and privilege to seek this experience from Him in these means till we are made the joyful partakers of it” (Maurice Roberts, The Thought of God, pp. 57-58)
May God graciously give us the ability to detect and flee from legalism. For to depend on our own merit for a relationship with the holy God of the universe will either crush us under its weight or force us to lower God’s perfect standard, thus deceiving ourselves into thinking we have kept it, and hence causing the ugly head of pride to rise up and strut around. In either case, this is not God’s intention for His children.
May our motivation rather be that of one smitten by the Lover of our souls. Once our spiritual eyes have come up close to God, once we have been enabled to see ourselves for what we are and God for who He is, it will be impossible to forget Him or turn back from Him. The Pursuer of our soul will now be the pursued.
Principal Design of Flavel’s Treatise
Flavel contends that “the visible reformation of its [Christianity’s] professors” is “by medicating the heart, and cleansing the fountain whence they [miscarriages of sin] proceed.” This “fountain” is identified as the heart. Using Proverbs 4:23 as the scriptural foundation, (“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life”), he expounds the treatise under four topics:
I. What Keeping the Heart Presupposes
II. Why Keeping the Heart is a Great Business
III. Special Seasons for Keeping the Heart
IV. Uses
As with many Puritan writers, Flavel is very thorough. He is not a writer who believed in broad generalities, but breaks his points down into particulars. You might say he is an artist who does not paint with broad strokes. In fact, he doesn’t even own a wide paintbrush. Instead, he is detail-oriented, making narrow strokes, driving the truth home to each conscience with precision.
Flavel presents a rich, in-depth treatment of the subject. After reading and studying this writing, we will agree with Charles Spurgeon when he states, “When we take down a volume of Puritan theology we find in a solitary page more thinking and more learning, more Scripture, more real teaching, than in whole folios of the effusions of modern thought. The modern man would be rich if he possessed even the crumbs that fall from the table of the Puritans” (Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon, p. 34).
John Flavel. Keeping the Heart. (Introduction by Maureen Bradley)
It is the hardest work: heart-work is hard work indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a loose and heedless spirit, will cost no great pains; but to set thyself before the Lord, and tie up thy loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon him, this will cost thee something. To attain a facility and dexterity of language in prayer, and put thy meaning into apt and decent expressions, is easy; but to get thy heart broken for sin while thou art confessing it, melted with free-grace while thou art blessing God for it; to be really ashamed and humbled through the apprehensions of God’s infinite holiness, and to keep thy heart in this frame, not only in, but after duty, will surely cost thee some groans and travailing pains of soul. To repress the outward acts of sin, and compose the external part of thy life in a laudable and comely manner, is no great matter; even carnal persons, by the force of common principles, can do this: but to kill the root of corruption within, to set and keep up a holy government over thy thoughts, to have all things lie straight and orderly in the heart, this is not easy.
It is a constant work: the keeping of the heart is such a work as is never done till life be done; this labor and our life end together. It is with a Christian in this business, as it is with seamen that have sprung a leak at sea; if they tug not constantly at the pump, the water increases upon them, and will quickly sink them; it is in vain for them to say, The work is hard and we are weary. There is no time or condition in the life of a Christian, which will suffer an intermission of this work. It is in the keeping watch over our hearts, as it was in the keeping up of Moses’ hands, while Israel and Amalek were fighting below. Exod. 17:12. No sooner do Moses’ hands grow heavy and sink down, but Amalek prevails. You know it cost David and Peter many a sad day and night for intermitting the watch over their own hearts but a few minutes.
It is the most important business of a Christian’s life. Without this we are but formalists in religion; all our professions, gifts, and duties signify nothing: “My son, give me thine heart.” God is pleased to call that a gift, which is indeed a debt: he will put this honor upon the creature, to receive it from him in the way of a gift; but if this be not given him, he regards not whatever else you bring to him: there is so much only of worth and value in what we do, as there is of heart in it.
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1573580775 ISBN 13: 9781573580779
Publisher: Soli Deo Gloria Publications
About the Author:
John Flavel served as a Puritan minister in the English seaport of Dartmouth. Educated at Oxford and ordained by Presbyterians, Flavel exemplified fidelity to the biblical theology of the Westminster Confession, heartfelt love for God, and passion for lost souls. One parishioner said, That person must have a very soft head, or a very hard heart, or both, that could sit under his ministry unaffected. He persevered in ministry even after the Act of Uniformity (1662) forced him out of his pulpit. He sometimes preached in the woods or on an island. He traveled in disguise and twice narrowly escaped arrest. In addition to suffering persecution, Flavel experienced much personal grief. He had to bury his wife and first child in his twenties, his second wife in his forties, and his third wife in his fifties. His father died of the plague while imprisoned for nonconformity in 1665. He lived to see the Act of Toleration (1689), but he said, We are veteran soldiers almost worn out. He proclaimed God’s Word to the end, dying of a massive stroke on June 6, 1691, while on a preaching trip to Exeter. Many Christians, including Jonathan Edwards and Archibald Alexander, have treasured his writings for their Christ-centered exposition of Reformed experiential godliness.
Review:
You are holding in your hands the heartbeat of Puritan pastoral ministry and Christian spirituality John Flavel’s plea to his congregation to guard their hearts from sin and keep them for Christ. This book is warm theology wed with wise advice on practical living from how to deal with prosperity or poverty, anger or abuse, sin or the sanctifying providences of suffering. When you read Flavel, open your Bible and your heart and learn from one of the most well-read pastors of his time in both Old and New England. –Adam Embry
