Cultivating the Garden of Your Heart - The Key to Every Victory

Oh the heart! If only we all fully understood the power that it contains to infinitely affect every single area of our lives, our relationship with God and the level of victory we are experiencing, we would all be prioritising and guarding our hearts above all else! If we want to know why we're struggling to see victory in any area of our lives, we need look no further than our heart. At the same time, our heart is the only place where we can make one single change - and see evidence of it in every area of our lives - our finances, relationships, health and so on. What an exciting understanding for walking in victory! Truly, what is going on in our heart is what determines the course of our entire lives. This is why, if you don't honestly know what it means to guard your heart or you aren't applying it to your life, God is giving you an amazing opportunity to do something about that right now, and change the course of your life. Your heart is the key to the life you were created to live. If you don't turn the key, you won't live your purposed life... but if you do choose to turn this single most powerful key, you will!

To guard something above all else means what? To focus on it and make it a priority in our lives... to watch over, nurture and protect it... in other words, to cultivate it like we would an actual cared-for and nurtured garden... dealing immediately with weeds or unwanted pests which would damage it, and planting beautiful new blooms so that they may grow. An unguarded heart quickly becomes a desolate heart, but a guarded heart quickly becomes a flourishing heart. How are you approaching your own heart? Do you know what it is to cultivate your heart? Is this a priority in your lifestyle?

There are two main reasons why prioritising your heart is vitally important. Because while the heart is many things, it is above all else, a garden. Your heart is your place of intimacy with Jesus... the place where you meet with and communicate with Him. It's not a place you can go to in the natural, but it's a place that your spirit can come into an awareness of in the spiritual. It's the place of being in His Presence... focused on Him and hearing the secrets He wants to whisper to you and the answers He wants to give you for every challenge you are facing. Imagine it! Our heart becomes a garden for our King to dwell in, and as He does, His life flows both into and through us, to bless others! Ultimately, the condition of your heart is going to determine the condition of your intimacy with the King. Your heart is the place where Jesus both reveals who He is and who you are... It is also the place where you decide how much of what He reveals you're willing to believe.

This brings me to second reason, which is that your heart is also your limitation. Your heart can be a place of adventure and intimacy with Jesus, where secrets from the secret place are conceived and promises are believed... or it can also be a place where you experience lack and unbelief, frustration and fear. It all depends on what you choose to believe, because the beliefs of your heart are also the boundaries of your heart. It's how you choose to respond to the truth that Jesus offers you about who He is and therefore who you are, which determines how you experience every aspect of your life.

God is continually trying to get good things to us and to the world through us, yet everything has to first go through the filter of our hearts - there is, quite literally, no other way for the life of Christ to permeate our world. If our hearts are not able, in their present condition, to receive what God is trying to get to us, there's no way to detour around that.

There was a time in my life when I was asking the Lord why I was not experiencing His provision. He showed me a vision of my hands. They were open before Jesus... and yet they were empty. He was trying to get provision to me, but He showed me that my heart couldn't receive it. Yet, once I realised that my heart was the hold up, and I asked Him to show me the reasons why my heart couldn't receive His provision, and we were able to together put off the lies that were keeping me in limitation and put on the truth that subsequently began to prosper my heart and my life. The good news is that each of us, at any moment, can choose to do the same. God is never holding out on us. He paid for our victory on every side and only our heart can stop us from living in it.

So what do we do, to cultivate the garden of our hearts? While I can only give a very brief overview in a blog post, here are the two main aspects to cultivating the garden of your heart:

Align Your Heart

Aligning your heart is continually living from a place of agreement and alignment with every single thing He says. That sounds really simple, but sometimes we don't realise how many beliefs we carry in our hearts which are contrary to God's word and ways (and are therefore keeping us out of experiencing God's promises). The only way we can truly know what is in our hearts is to prize our intimacy with Him, so that Holy Spirit can reveal to us what we ourselves cannot otherwise know:

The heart is...a puzzle that no one can figure out. But I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be.” Jeremiah 17:9 (MSG)

In other words, when Holy Spirit shows us something we're believing that is contrary to what God says, we're to prayerfully put off the lie that has been holding us back, and put on the truth that will bring us into freedom. For example, "I put off the lie that I don't deserve to succeed, and I put on the truth that Jesus thought I was worthy to die for, so that I could succeed in what He has created me to do. He says I am the righteousness of Christ, therefore I deserve to succeed." Once you bring the truth of the cross to any belief, it is immediately exposed as a lie and you can then choose to walk in the truth. Sometimes this requires tremendous humility. People erroneously tend to think that humility is about putting yourself down and feeling bad about yourself... looking at everything you've done wrong. If that were the case, Jesus wouldn't look at us as righteous, yet He does (2 Cor 5:21). In reality, humility means to lay down your own opinion in order to agree with God's. And sometimes that means essentially praying, 'Lord, show me the truth about me... no matter how beautiful it is.' When God says good things about who we are because He sees us no longer after the flesh but after the spirit (2 Cor 5:16) and we choose to believe those truths, we are walking in humility, even if others around us think we're being prideful (like David's brothers thought he was, in1 Sam 17:28). In reality, to disagree with the good things God says about us and the promises He has given us is what is prideful!

So aligning our hearts with His heart means that we live in continual alignment - every time He shows us some place where we've been believing a lie, we choose to keep coming back into agreement with His truth. Essentially, we are pulling down and destroying what is not of the Kingdom of God, so that only what is of the Kingdom of God may remain. We are getting rid of the weeds and digging out the thorns so that our garden can no longer be ravaged by those things, and our lives can no longer be derailed through the boundaries of our hearts. Getting rid of the lies is getting rid of the boundaries. There is nothing that will destroy the limitations of your heart more quickly than aligning your heart with Jesus - the Limitless One!

Nurture Your Heart

The first important part of cultivating the garden of our hearts is to align our hearts. The other is to nurture our hearts. When we nurture our hearts, it is like fertilising our garden and planting new flowers on purpose. We deliberately expand our hearts to experience the beauty and the abundance of the Kingdom. This is building up and planting - establishing and growing the Kingdom of God in our hearts so that we can see it ever grow and expand into the world. We see ourselves in truth, we deliberately design our lives to experience the greatest sense of abundance possible, and we bless our lives by doing the things which bring joy and life to our souls. However, the Lord showed me that despite the value He puts on the nurturing of our hearts, most people in the body of Christ, do not put a huge priority on it. It’s not like as though we’ve ever been taught how to nurture our hearts… or that doing so is something we should prioritise. After all, religion has done a very good job of convincing us that we’re not worthy of nurture.

To nurture means to lovingly take care of something, to care for and protect it while it is growing. It just sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it! He pays the price we should have paid, and then tells us that He wants us to delight in the life that He has given us… that He wants to build up our hearts by establishing them in abundance and joy and everything that is of the Kingdom of God (Rom 14:17). He wants us to live in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. As you can see, it’s not about our physical circumstances, but about how we are experiencing our lives in our hearts.

To live a life in abundance means we must live from a heart that is in abundance.

This is why nurturing our hearts is so important. If we just focus on the tearing down of the lies and demonic structures, and even writing truth on our hearts to replace them, we’re still not going to experience the same sense of abundance as we will when we deliberately nurture our hearts by giving them permission and direction to enjoy all the Lord has provided for us. To nurture your heart by enjoying your life is as important as anything else we do. If we don't, we are in effect choosing to act like the Israelites described in Psalm 106:24:

The people refused to enter the pleasant land, for they wouldn’t

believe His promise to care for them. Psalm 106:24 (NLT)

It doesn't say the promised land - it says the PLEASANT land! He was offering them a life that would be pleasant for them—He wanted them to ENJOY their lives! He wanted them to live from a place of rest, peace and joy. Not tiredly working from early morning until late at night, but freely and lightly. He wanted them to have margin and enjoy beautiful moments. He wanted them to take time to enjoy festivals and food and relationships. In short, a life which nurtured their heart and lives. He was offering it all to them… yet it was their own hearts which refused it. Do we do the same? Do our own hearts keep us out of entering the pleasant land because we instead choose to toil, and only do what we think God thinks is important... and think nothing of our own self care, nurture and enjoyment? If we really believe His promise to care for us, we will honour the sacrifice He has made, and live a life which deliberately nurtures and puts our hearts into a place of abundance, so that we can receive all He has for us.

So today, begin the journey of cultivating your heart by learning to live a lifestyle of alignment and nurture. As you do, you will see everything in your world start to change...

---

Everything about our life, our relationship with God and our level of victory proceeds out of our heart. Cultivating the Garden of Your Heart will give you practical tools to align your heart with Christ's, and remove the limitations which keep you bound to living in less than what He paid for. You will discover how to live from a limitless place of flourishing life and intimate connection with our King.

We invite you today to join us on the Living Treasure journey. Enjoy the first 10 days for free as you test the waters and discover if this journey is a good fit for you. We bless the garden of your heart to flourish and grow!

Living Treasure Journeying is a monthly online membership which is designed to connect you to the heart of God, equip you to fulfil your purpose and empower you to live a life which works.