Don't Harden Your Heart

Here’s Today’s Devotional from The Vine…

As he sowed, some seeds fell by the roadside, and the birds came and devoured them. - Matthew 13:4

 

How are human hearts beaten into a highway?

A child’s heart is sensitive to every impression. But as it grows older, the thousands of influences, feelings, emotions and imaginations, treading over it continuously, trample it into hardened heart. Every time the child feels she ought to do a certain thing and does not do it, allowing the good impulse to pass, she is left a little less sensitive to do the right thing then next time.

The same effect is produced by the experiences of life which are common to us all. The wheels and traffic of day-to-day business go lumbering over the heart. We ought to have our hearts fenced in, and allow none of these heavy vehicles to pass over them. A businessman ought to keep his heart soft and warm in the midst of all his business, tender as a little child’s, humble, teachable, loving, and trusting. He ought to have a secret place in his inner life into which no unwholesome traffic, none but the priestly feet of heavenly guests, should ever pass. But too many make their hearts an open passage-way, till they are beaten into a hardened state that nothing can have any further influence.

Another way is by the traffic of sinful habits. There’s an old legend of a goblin horseman that galloped over men’s fields at night; and wherever his foot struck, the soil was so blasted that nothing would ever grow on it again. So is it with the heart over which the sinful feet of lust, sensuality, greed, selfishness, and passion are allowed to tread. There’s an idea which exists that it’s somehow OK for us to indulge in sin for a time, so long as we repent afterwards. This is a lie of Satan who tries to whisper it in our ears. The heart that is repeatedly trampled on by vile lusts or sinful activity of any kind is never the same again!

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