Guard Your Heart

Pastor Steven Osborne
Transcribed by PulpitAI (with edits)

So when Pastor Steven asked me to speak yesterday—no, just kidding, he asked me a long time ago. I sent him a message, and I said, “Is there something you want me to speak on, or can I go rogue?” And then I blocked his message.

The Harvesting Process

But this last year, I just completed—I think it’s my fifteenth year of working the harvest out in Breckenridge, Minnesota, where I used to pastor, and Marijo taught. And when I started out there, my only directions I knew—you go to this road, take a right, you take a left, and that’s basically it. I didn’t know that they said, “Okay, go down here, go north, then you turn east” or “west” or “south.” So I learned directions.

I didn’t know terminology, like “tear,” “headland,” “diff lock,” or “piler,” to name a few.

I didn’t know roads. You know, it might be Road County 17, but because the Yaggy family owns some land there, they call it the Yaggy Road. So they said, “Take the Yaggy Road down to the piler.”

I said, “What’s a Yaggy Road?” And then I learned after 15 years. I know the Yaggy Road.

I learned to drive a big tri-axle dump truck, shifting it without using the clutch. Now, some of you don’t even know what a clutch is, so you’re not impressed. And I did this every day when I worked from 1:30 in the afternoon till 1:30 in the morning. I used to joke that it gave me a taste of what eternity felt like.

I actually even learned to eat my lunch, because when I first started, it’d be about 3/4:00 I’d start, open my lunch box and I’d start eating, which is a kiss of death for me. I would just keep eating and eating and munching. And by about 6:00, my lunch was done. And then I had seven or eight long hours with no lunch. So I learned to improvise, and I ate at 4:30, 7:30, 10:30, half a sandwich at each one.

But in the farming world, seed is a very valuable commodity. I called my farmer friend up (who I worked for) and I said, “How much did you spend in seed this year? You don’t have to tell me, but I want to know.” And my farmers that I worked for spent $416,000 just in seed. And when you spend that much, you do whatever you can to take care of the soil, the seed, because you want to get the most for your money.

And not only do they spend that money on seed, they spend money on taking care of the soil. Many years, the farmer will ride in the tractor with a little low trailer and grade-school-age kids. They’ll pay kids just to pick rocks, put them in the trailer. Go through all these fields, pick rocks. How’s that for an exciting job? And the reason they do spend 2–300 or whatever they spend is because one rock getting caught in their piece of machinery can shut the whole thing down, can break equipment. So it’s worth it to pay someone to pick rocks.

They trench their fields. They have GPSs. They have lasers. And so they don’t want standing water in the fields because seeds don’t grow very well in standing water. They also use fertilizer. They rotate their crops, all to get the most for their money in growing their seed.

So they do what they can do, and they trust God for the rest. They trust God for sunshine, for rain at the right times, but not too much rain. You ever hear a farmer talk in church? “How much rain did you get at your place?”

“Well I got nine-tenths on my end.”

“Oh, really? I only got an inch and a quarter.”

And I’m thinking, “You guys are weird,” you know? But then I started paying attention to that. That’s a big deal to the farmers. How much rain did they get?

My one farmer friend said, “No matter what, Dean, farmers are never happy. We either got too much this, not enough this. What’s good for one crop is not good for another crop.” So he said, “We’re never happy.”

But every year, I would drive truck for the sugar beet harvest. And many steps are involved, and there’s intricate terminology to be used during the first one.

So can we have the first picture there, please? Okay, that machine there, that is called—that machine there goes down the road. So you see to the left there, that’s the sugar beets. And that machine, as they go down the field, cuts the tops off the sugar beets. You never guess what they call it. A “topper.” They’re really good at this.

Okay, next picture. That machine there lifts the beets up out of the ground. And they call that a “lifter.” It’s hard to learn this terminology. You see by the truck there, see that right there, that hose that’s hanging. When I drive the truck, I have to drive about six inches away from the hose so that the beets coming in don’t cause the truck to be overloaded one way or the other. So you really have to keep an eye on that.

Next one, please. See, there I am. I drive, looking in that mirror, and that’s all I look at. And then the guy in the tractor will say, “Go forward, go backwards,” or there’ll be actually a little arrow light sometimes at night telling me to go forward or backward. So it takes a lot of concentration to be able to do that.

Next one, please. Lots of concentration.

Next one. Then we bring the beets with a full truck to this place here where they pile the beets. They call that a “piler.” I know this is hard to understand, and I’m taking it slow with you people. So you drive up that little ramp there, and the back of the ramp folds up, and there’s an arrow that tells you to bring the truck up, and it dumps. And then it ends up being—next one—a pile of beets like that. Those are probably softball size. And there’s hundreds and hundreds and thousands of them everywhere out there.

And before we moved out to Breckenridge, I didn’t even know that sugar beets made sugar. I just thought all sugar came from sugar cane.

There’s problems that they face, that every farmer faces. It can be too hot. It can be too cold. Some years they are really hard. Some years there’s breakdowns. You don’t want the lifter to break down because that stops the whole process. And you fix the lifter when it’s 40 degrees out. You fix the lifter when it’s 60. You cannot not fix the lifter.

So last year—if it gets too hot, you can’t lift beets. If it gets too cold, you can’t lift beets. If it gets too wet, you can’t lift beets. And so last year was a good year for the farmers because it was good weather. There was no rain hardly at all during the whole harvest. But every year the farmer does whatever it takes to keep the soil healthy and get the harvest in.

Now, my farmers are amazing with their memory. They’ll say, “Yeah, 2012, that was a tough year. We had a drought then. Oh, yeah, but 2002, there was so much rain.” And I’m thinking, I don’t know any years. I know I got married in 1980, and we had kids born in ‘82, ‘4, ‘6, and ‘8. After that, I don’t know my years. But they do.

Reflect On Your Year

We’re at the end of another year. Stop and think for a moment. How was this past year for you? What was it like? Was it hard? Wonderful? Tough? “I don’t remember. It went by so fast.” For those of you with cameras, you want to know what you did this last year? Check your phones, and you’ll go, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

Some of you are saying, “I am just so glad this year is over.” But chances are, we all experienced something we didn’t plan on experiencing. Good, bad, fun, or painful.

In the parable that Christo did so well on there, there’s four conditions. You know, it doesn’t say “The Parable of the Sower” in my Bible. It says, “The Parable of the Soils.” And there were four types. There’s the path, the rocky ground, and the thorns. And I was wondering—and I don’t know if there’s an answer to it—but I wonder if the thorns were actually good soil at one time, and thorns were allowed to grow in. And then there was the good soil. But the soil is the condition of our heart.

You know that over a year, a lot can happen to our hearts? I don’t know if you’re like me, but why do the hard times just pop out? And the joys sometimes can kind of slip to the background. A lot can happen to our hearts in a year. Hurts come. Disappointments come. We can be wounded. Our hearts can get hard. And it can really be difficult when the one you’re most disappointed in is God. And then it can be even more difficult when you’re in a church where everything is going just fine for every believer but you, and you don’t want to tell anyone here that you’re disappointed in God, because what kind of good Christian would tell someone else that you’re disappointed in God, because that isn’t faith, right? We can feel that way. Not true. We all have heart conditions.

Through a year, our hearts can become dry. Our hearts can become self-absorbed. But the condition of the heart impacts how the seed will grow.

Guard Your Heart

Farmers cannot afford for the ground to get hard. They just can’t afford for the ground to get hard. They have these things—and I called my farmer friend—a big field, like 300 acres, will take about four days, 24 hours a day, 96 hours, to do the whole field. And you might have like three or four driveways into that field. And with semis, loaded trucks going in and out of the same driveway coming in from the road, that ground can get very, very hard. Hard as a rock. And the farmers will take time during the harvest to use a chisel plow, which breaks up all that hard ground, because no matter what, they have to think ahead too. They can’t let the ground get hard.

Even in the midst of a good harvest, when life is good, it’s possible for your heart to get hard. Proverbs 4:23, one of my favorite verses, says:

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for it is the wellspring of life.

Put this on your to-do list, and if you get around to it, guard your heart. Nope. “Above all else.”

You know, I’m a list person, and I know there’s a lot of great people like me here that are list people. But you know, you might have eight things on your list—one thing I learned a long time ago: you hardly ever get everything done on your list. And if your list is getting low, just ask your wife, and then that’ll help you with your list, okay? But on my list for the day, I will number one, two, three, in order of what I want to do. What’s the most important thing I got to get done today? And so if I don’t get everything done on my list, I got the most important things done, and that’s okay.

Above all else, guard your heart,
    for it is the wellspring of life.

I’ve never used the word “wellspring” in a conversation before. I looked it up, and it means “an original and bountiful source of something.” I like that it said “original.” We are all original in God’s eyes. Guard your heart, for within you is an original and bountiful source of life that God wants to use you.

Another version says:

Guard your heart above all else,
    for it determines the course of your life.

Now the word “guard”—I always looked at it, “Guard your heart,” “Keep the bad stuff out! Don’t let that in! Stop!” But it had a little more to it in the meaning. The word “guard” means “watch, protect, keep, and preserve.”

Do you know that if you have some type of salad after dinner and you leave it out for two or three days, you are not doing well at preserving the salad? It will preserve better in the refrigerator. We are to keep our hearts, preserve our hearts, watch and protect our hearts.

See, soil, like the heart, never stays constant. Just because one field is in great shape this year due to weather and whatever, it might not be in great shape next year. Once it’s good, it doesn’t automatically stay that way. Same with our hearts, because we know—we’ve heard Pastor Steven say this—life can get messy.

And there is a picture—this here is also a field, full of mud, full of water. And sometimes when a field gets muddy like that, they will have a tractor that has a big arm on the back of it, and it will click onto your semi, or my truck. And this big tractor pulls the truck. They call this a “pull tractor”—I know I’m going fast for you—and that will pull us out into the field. And the pull tractor—I asked my farmer friend, “How much does something like this cost?”

“Oh, about a half a million dollars.” One tractor.

But they would pull you out of the field, and then when you get out onto the road, that arm would unclick, and then you’d go to the piler. But at some point, you can’t even do that. And you know what you do with this field? It’s all a mess? You wait. There’s nothing else you can do except wait.

So what has happened to your heart this past year? Are you wounded? Have you withdrawn?

Maybe you’ve gotten cynical. You know, when you’re wounded, it’s kind of fun to get cynical, but it’s only fun to get cynical when you’re with other people who are cynical. Let’s have a little—just the six of us here—we’ll have a cynical club, and we’ll all go and talk about how rotten something is, and all those people at church, they do this, they do that, and I’m happy being cynical in my cynical group. But a cynical group of people doesn’t bring people to healing very often.

Are you disappointed in God? See, a wounded heart needs care and time to preserve. That’s part of guarding your heart. It needs care and time to preserve. And that’s okay to take time.

Maybe this last year you were just going through the motions. Haven’t felt that close to God. You know, you should try feeling close to God with three, four, five kids at home. Maybe you haven’t spent some time with him in a long while.

I read about a guy, he said, “I missed my workout yesterday, and I feel so bad. It’s been three years.”

Maybe you’ve had a great year, full of joy and gratefulness. Probably won’t stay that way always.

How to Guard Your Heart

So are you aware of what you have to do to guard, preserve, keep, and protect your heart?

In Luke 8:14 Jesus is explaining the parable of the soils, and he says:

“The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life’s worries, riches and pleasures…”

Now it’s interesting to me that—well, no one should worry, right? But riches and pleasures don’t seem like evil things. But both the good and the bad can choke out what God wants to do in our hearts. So what do you have to guard your heart against? I thought of a few: selfishness, self-pity, complacency, Matthew 13 calls it “the worries of life,” the lure of wealth, pleasures, worry, anxiety, lust, or greed. It may be that what you have to guard your heart against may be different than what someone else has to guard their heart. But you have to guard your heart.

Do you know that we tend to talk about what captures our hearts? And right after the service, if anyone wants to see pictures of my grandkids, I would love to show you. They capture my heart.

When I first moved out to Breckenridge, Marijo and I were out to dinner, and two farmers were together. And I was sitting out with them on a deck, and they were talking farming stuff, and I was total rookie out there. And finally, one of them says, “Well pastor, I bet this is kind of boring for you, isn’t it?”

And I said, “No, not really.” And inside I said, “This is really boring.” Had I known them better, I would have said, “This is really boring, let’s talk about something else,” but I didn’t. But the farmers were talking about what captures their heart. We all tend to do that.

Another thing to guard in a different way and keep are the precious moments that took place this last year. The smile of a grandchild. Maybe you had an awesome family wedding. Maybe you realize how good God has been this last year. Put them, in a sense, in your memory bank of faith, because through the years you will remember how faithful God has been in your life.

Perseverance

Luke 8:15 talked about the seed on the good soil, and,

“[It] stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.”

Now I really like that except for the word “persevering.” The word “persevere” means “endurance, patience,” and the Dean translation, “it ain’t easy.” But it doesn’t say, interestingly enough, that, “You have a good crop, good soil, put your feet up. Relax. Everything will just turn out fine just because you have a good soil.” Even when the soil’s good, we will have times in our life where we need to persevere. We need to endure. See, good soil does not equal an easier, problem-free life. And it’s interesting, he says, “… who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering…” This is how it’s done. I want a plan B. I don’t want to—persevering is not really fun. It’s not exciting. It just does dumb things like build character and build strength and give wisdom and discernment.

See, guard your heart. Above all else, guard your heart. You have a say as to the condition of your heart. It’s your responsibility and my responsibility.

So the question this morning—one of many I’ll ask—what are you doing about guarding your heart? Are you abdicating your responsibility?

There’s one honest soul.

“I can’t help it! How would you feel if that happened to you? Dadadadadadada…”

You’re still responsible to guard your heart. The bottom line is that it is still your heart to take care of.

Healing Takes Time

Now I don’t think we understand the value of time in the healing process. I think time is one of the maybe main ingredients, important ingredient, that God uses to help us heal.

We think nothing—you break a leg. If it’s a good break, it takes six weeks (I heard a doctor say one time), and the bone will be as strong as it’s ever been. So you have a break, allow six weeks you’re good to go.

Many many years ago I ruptured my Achilles tendon. Now I felt it go up my leg, and no one told me how long it would take. And it was a year from the time I did it to the time I could actually maybe run again without being, “Oh, careful, careful, don’t want to hurt the leg!” And I finally got to be able to play basketball again, and I still had my one-inch vertical, and it was a lot of fun. But different wounds require different lengths of time to heal. You have to do what you can. Above all else, preserve your heart.

I heard a saying that says, “Time heals all wounds.” I don’t believe that specifically. I do believe that time, with right response, heals wounds. We’ve all gone through things, and you know, if you’re fresh off a wound, just talking about it just gets you all stirred up, all angry again, and “Arrrggghhh,” blood pressure goes up. And then sometime down the road, you might talk about that same instant, and boom, blood pressure stays the same, everything’s good, life goes on, and over time God has worked healing in your heart. Sometimes we may even understand and see a reason for it. Sometimes we may not. But God still works healing in our hearts.

The Unchanging Gospel

See, the gospel, or the seed, is the same yesterday, today, forever. The value of the seed never changes. During the harvest I’ve never been given a choice as to the weather. God’s never said,
“Dean, what kind of weather would you like this harvest?” He’s never done that. But no matter the weather, we always worked when we could. And it’s the same year in, year out. The harvest never gets easier. The machinery they have is amazing, the technology. I once joked with my farmer friend, I said, “What do pastors and farmers have in common?” And I said, “We both get a lot of work done sitting on our butts.”

It’s still work to persevere. Just like the harvest weather, you and I don’t have a say, many times in life, what happens to us. Maybe much of this last year, what’s happened is not your fault. Maybe you made a poor choice. Either way, guard your heart. Guard your heart.

The hard times will come. Are you guarding your heart?

Jesus Knows You

My brother-in-law has a little plaque at his house. You know the old—we call it the children’s song—“Jesus Loves Me, This I Know?” Some of you are singing in your head right now. And he’s he’s got it different. He says, “Jesus knows me, this I love.” Next time I say that saying, I’ll say I thought of it, but I have to be honest right now. And I’ve thought about that. “Jesus knows me, this I love.” Right now, as you’re sitting, Jesus knows you. He knows your heart. He knows your hurts. And it helps to be honest with him.

This last year I started on a low dose of blood pressure medicine. And so I don’t like taking my blood pressure at home, because if it’s high then I just get all nervous about it, so it’s a dumb thing for me to do. So I go to my doctor, and he says, “Have you been checking your blood pressure at home?”

And I said, “Well, once in a while.”

And he says, “Does ‘once in a while’ mean ‘never?’”

I said, “Shut up.” No, I says, “Yep,” and then I explained to him.

He goes, “Well, in your case that’s probably a good idea.”

But Jesus knows you, this I love. Wherever your heart is at right today, Jesus knows.

Protect Your Heart

Maybe you need to do what you need to do to preserve your heart, to protect it, to keep it, to guard it. Above all else, as we end this year, your heart condition this year is gonna carry over into next year.

You know, when I finished, usually I would get 120 or so hours, give or take a few, doing the sugar beet harvest. Only that. And when I was done, it was like, “Thank God, I am done. Honey, I’m coming home.” But the farmer, when the farmer’s done with sugar beets, they finish their wheat and beans and corn. And then you think they’re done, but no they’re not done either. Then they take the chisel plow, and they go and prepare the fields, run it all the way through the fields, and then if they have time, they take a machine called the “ripper,” that even digs deeper to prepare the soil for next year, because another crop is coming, and they’re going to do it all over again.

This year is gonna lead into next and to next and to next. And the next week or two is a time where we normally, you know, talk about getting in shape and don’t do anything about it. We talk about eating healthier, and we do so for two days. But above all that, guard your heart.