Dear Friends,
What do you need to watch against most carefully or it will betray you,
even destroy you? Today’s attached devotional should put you on your
guard. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Proverbs 4:23 (ESV)

  23 Keep your heart with all vigilance,
  for from it flow the springs of life.

“Nothing can be so restless and fleeting ¾ no part of my nature can be so changeful ¾ than my heart. How exceedingly vain, trifling, wandering, and unsettled is this vagabond. Never fixed on the will of God, never stirred by divine guidance and counsel, if follows instead its own whims. It is in perpetual motion, without any principle of rest within it. It is under a thousand different determinations at once, and flies about after innumerable quests. It makes experiments but to no purpose. It seeks rest everywhere but it finds it not. Happiness flies away from it.” [Bernard of Clairvaux, The Love of God abridged, edited, and introduced by James M. Houston, (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1983), p. 7]

“…‘Keep thy heart with all diligence’…; or, as it is in the Hebrew, ‘above all keeping’. It needs more keeping than anything else, for all the rest of the faculties and members are at the heart’s disposal.  Therefore keep a strict watch and strong guard over you heart.” [Ralph Venning, The Plague of Plagues: A Treatise on Sin, (London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1669), p. 244-245]