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Dec 01, 2024

Keep the Peace of the Heart Before Everything

Keep the Peace of the Heart Before Everything

Passage: Proverbs 4:23

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: 2024 Advent - Peace On Earth: The First and Lasting Promise of Christmas

The first promise in the arrival of Christ is “peace on earth.” Peace plays a big part in Luke’s explanation of Jesus’s ministry, operating on several fronts. One of those: the human heart. As elusive as it is to experience an abiding peace, so the peace of God is meant to reside there. What must we know of the nature of the heart and the care for the heart to see peace abide?

 

CENTRAL TEXT:  Proverbs 4:23

Keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flows springs of life

 

PRAYER/SCRIPTURE READING/CONFESSION OF FAITH: Matthew 12:33-37

LEADER:  Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. 34 You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. 35 The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil. 36 I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, 37 for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.”

The Word of the LORD

ALL:   Thanks be to God

 

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Proverbs 3:1-2

  • Luke 21:34

  • Acts 20:28

  • 1 Timothy 4:16

 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 

  1. Name a song that does a decent job of summarizing your current outlook. Now–dare you venture a song that might summarize your innermost being?  

  2. Why would this father and mother seeking to imbue their child with wisdom not have him be most concerned with outward behaviors and appearance? Why the heart?  

  3. Why is this kind of attention to our heart both a personal matter and a relational/interpersonal matter? Why does guarding it require more than our own effort? What’s a blind spot another helped you notice?

  4. Of the most common disturbances of peace–fear, anger, shame–which do you most commonly experience? Why do you think so? [Personal–we know!] What is your “coping mechanism” of choice when any of those disturbances arise?

  5. What answer(s) does the gospel have for any of those disturbances? In the moment of disturbance, those “answers” may fall flat and feel too remote to matter. But what may we do to make ourselves receptive to their mercy to us?

  6. As we said in the sermon, there is plenty beyond our control that militates against the presence of peace in our heart. And (as we also said) there is plenty within our reach that if we attended to it might restore or preserve that peace in the heart. What for you might be in that second category? What might be your hesitation to adjust your way? What good might follow if you did?

 

ILLUSTRATIONS:  

 

QUOTES:  

  • Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
    - C. S..Lewis, Mere Christianity 

  • ...now I'm not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life. Like the day they arrived.
    - “    Louise Banks” in Arrival

  • Our hearts are like compasses and homing beacons: our loves are pulled magnetically to some north toward which our hearts have been calibrated. Our actions and behavior–indeed a whole way of life–are pulled out of us by this attraction to some vision of the good life.
    - James K.A. Smith    , You Are What You Love

  • Let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity, their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.
    - Evagrius of Pontus 

  • Attain the spirit of peace, and thousands of people around you will be saved.
    - St Seraphim of Sarov

  • The opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.
    - Johann Hari (HT: Griffin Gooch)

  • When distracting thoughts press down on you when they stand between you and God and stubbornly demand your attention, pretend you don’t even notice them. Try looking over their shoulders, as if you’re searching for something else, and you are. That something else is God, hidden in a cloud of unknowing.
    - Anonymous,     The Cloud of Unknowing

 

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