Guarding Your Heart in Relationships

Talk it Over

Guardrails keep vehicles from straying into dangerous or off-limit areas. We need personal guardrails so we don’t stray into areas of life that can harm us or the people we love. It’s vital to erect guardrails around our hearts. An unguarded heart can overpower our most guarded behavior. What’s done cannot be undone. What’s said cannot be unsaid. Our behavior defines the quality of our relationships and our lives.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• When have you seen someone blow up a marriage, finances, or a career when something on their inside got loose on the outside?

• Read Proverbs 4:23. What connections do you see between what’s in your heart and the way you behave? How has what is in your heart influenced your relationships with others? How has it influenced your relationship with God?

• During the message, they said that God is more bothered by how we treat others than by how we follow religious rules. Has a religious rule ever caused you to treat someone poorly? If so, what happened?

• Read Philippians 4:6–7. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “none” and 10 being “I’m overwhelmed,” how much anxiety are you currently experiencing in life? Does the idea of addressing your anxiety by thanking God and taking your requests to him seem realistic? Why or why not?

• Do any of these emotions regularly ding your conscience—guilt (“I owe you”), anger (“you owe me”), greed (“I owe me”), or jealousy (“God owes me”)?

• What is one thing you can do this week to begin to establish a guardrail around your heart? What can you do to take a step toward confessing if you feel guilt, forgiving if you feel anger, giving if you feel greed, or celebrating if you feel jealousy? How can this group support you?

 Good morning everyone. I'm Pauline. No time for chitchat or funny intros today. We've got a lot to get through. We've got a game. We've got a book synopsis, synopsis, and summary and dissertation to get through. We've got a puppet that I didn't realize was a puppet until yesterday. We've got a demonstration, so let's get cracking.

Should we start with our game? Yes, we will. We will. Okay. This is a game of my own division devising. I made up this game. It's called How Many Blanks Does a Blank Have? So you don't have to stand up for this game. You can just say right there. I'm gonna ask you some trivia questions, and all you need to do is use your hands to hold up however many fingers you think the answer is.

They're all numerical answers. You don't have to make words out of your fingers. So we'll do a test run of how many blanks does a blank have. If I said to you how many legs does a cat have, what would you do? Geniuses. Everyone said four. That's great. All right. Is everyone ready to play? How many blanks does a blank have?

Okay, first question, how many brains does an octopus have? How many do you think you might have to use? I've given you a hint. You might have used two hands oh oh eight. Sing a few eights if you said eight. You're wrong. It's nine. They do have one in each tentacle. Who said nine? Ethan? Smartest guy in the room.

They have one in each tentacle and one in their head. Okay. How many brains does a cockroach have? Worst insect ever created. Oh zero megs. I like that answer. Anyone else? One. It's two. Oh, look at these smart guys at the front. They have two. They have one in their head and they have one in their ganglia, which I assume is their body.

Why God would give the most disgusting creature in the world. The ability to live after it's been beheaded. That's how they can live. Okay. How many brains does a leach have? I would've said none, but that's not the answer. I'm just giving you a big hint. How many anyone? Six, seven. No one else wants to try.

Well, you know what, the answer's 32, so you're all wrong. I know you don't have that many fingers. They have 32 brains. I mean, yeah, brains. That's so weird, isn't it? Okay. How many brains, how many brains does a human have? A what? A human, A person. It depends which one, one I'm gonna say, oh, Len has said two.

I'm gonna say two. We have one in our head. And then scientists also say our gut system is so intelligent that they call it a brain. So half a point. If you said one half a point, if you said two how many eyes moving on to eyes, how many eyes does an iguana have? Lizardy type creature. How many anyone?

Four. Two. Two. Four. Oh, four. That's interesting. You're all wrong. It's three. They have three. They have two big ones and a little motion detector at the top. A pyramid. A pyramid of eyeballs. All right. I didn't know this one. How many eyes does a bee have if you know this? I, everything I learned about bees, I learned from the Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld.

Oh, what are you saying, Tom? Did anyone else say five? It's five. They have five eyes. I didn't know that. Okay. The Ramus worm. The Ramus worm has how many bums? How many, how many, how many bums, how many bottoms? How many bottoms does the Ramus worm have? Two, two. No one even knows what it is, do they? It has over 100 bottoms.

Again, trick question. Did anyone get that? That's such a shame because I was gonna give the winner a $1,000 voucher to the Junction Cafe, but no one knew that the ramus worm has a hundred butts. And you know what the ramus worm actually lives in, of course, Australia. And it's the coastal, like warm waters.

So chances are some of you here have swam with a multi bombed. Ramus worm. Okay. How many stomachs does a kangaroo have? I didn't know this. Four. Four? No. Three, three. Three, two. They have two stomachs. What about a dolphin? How many stomachs does a dolphin have? 1, 2, 1. One. It's actually four. Yes. A couple of people over there said four.

They have four. Four stomach chambers. How many hearts does a human have? A last question in, how many blanks does a blank have? How many hearts? Come on guys, it's a trick question. What? What would your answer be if it was a trick question? You're still sticking me One, some people said two. I'm gonna say the answer is two.

We have our aortic pump, which is right now pumping blood through our body. If you are breathing, you are pumping. And then we also have our heart, which is that inner part of ourselves. That is like our emotional center. It's our personality. So yeah, a bit of a trick question, but well done everybody.

I'm sorry. There was no winners. That was an intensely tough game. So you know, as Pastor Kev said, this whole series has been about our heart and today we're very specifically talking about the heart. And when I was reading through some stuff that was written when Jesus was around, so this is now 2000 something years ago, I was really interested that.

It talked about the word heart as in our, our emotions and our self. And I thought, I wonder if that's a translation thing, because English is actually a very primitive language. Like we don't have a lot of adjectives and verbs in English that other languages do. So I thought maybe we just don't have the equivalent word that they used in Hebrew.

So I looked it up. No. It turns out that what they believed back then, they knew like they had vivisection, they knew the body parts. They knew we had a heart there. And so they believed that the heart, which is your life-giving organ was the seat of your soul. And that all of the decisions that you made and the actions that you took came from that life-giving organ.

So that's why they use the same word for your heart and your heart, and they use this word. This was the word that they used in the original cardio. Hopefully it'll come up in a second. If not, I'll just tell you. It's K A R D I A. I see it at the back. It's not showing up on the screen, so that's fine.

There it is. So what word do you think that we get outta that today? Cardio, cardio. Vascular cardiomyopathy. I'm doing my cardio, getting my heart pumping. So even before this stuff was written, you know, when Jesus was around, there was another guy a thousand years before that, very wise guy named Solomon.

He was king, and he wrote a whole bunch of wisdom as things, little nuggets of information about how to live a great life. He wrote about all the things, marriage, love hopelessness, what happens when you die. They were called Proverbs. And they're all together. And then at the end, he said, all that stuff is really, really great.

But there's one thing that's even more important, and if you forget everything else that I've said, just remember this above all else, guard your heart because everything you do flows from it. So you can just forget all of that if you need to. Just remember this one thing, your heart is first and foremost, and if you've been in church, For anything longer than a few weeks, you've probably heard one or zillion messages about how important it's to guard our heart.

I'm fully aware of that. So we're gonna come at it from a little bit of a different angle today. And we're gonna start with something that Jesus said, which helps us just get a little bit of perspective on, on why we need to guard our heart. And then we'll look at what that actually means and what it looks like.

So, Jesus, he was in his thirties ish. He was at that point traveling around and teaching, and he was hanging out with his buddies, the 12 of them, which we now just easily call the 12 disciples. And they're all hanging around eating. And these religious police people, right, we'll call them, they were there to make sure that everybody was following all the laws of God.

They came along and they said, ha. Because they loved, you know, trying to trap Jesus in, you know, he's done something wrong. They said, we saw that you didn't wash your hands before you ate. That's one of God's laws, and you broke it. And Jesus says, I'm sure he just put his food down calmly and said, hold on.

Actually, first of all, that's not one of God's laws. You made that up. You've made up a lot of laws and that's one that you made up. And we're actually gonna call it a tradition, and I don't need to follow your traditions. And the reason that they were saying to wash their hands is not because they were worried about germs and bacteria.

It's because it was considered symbolic of washing off anything impure or unclean that you had touched and then might. Transfer to the food that you're eating and then by digesting that, you've then become impure in front of God and therefore then you're not like in communion with God anymore. That was what they believed.

So they said If you symbolically wash your hands, you're washing off that pig that you touched, cuz you're not allowed to eat pig meat. And Jesus said, no, no, that's. Not a thing. That's not a thing. You made that up. And then he says this to them cuz the disciples start asking him some stuff. So this is written down in the book of Matthew.

So Matthew was one of his 12 and he wrote about a whole bunch of stuff that Jesus did cuz he traveled around with Jesus. And this is what Jesus said in this is what Matthew wrote that Jesus said. He said, don't you see that whatever enters the mouth, goes into the stomach and then out of the body. So short anatomy lesson, food goes in, poop comes out, nothing spiritual happens in between.

There's, he's saying there's nothing. It's not about the contents of your stomach, but the things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart and these defile them. And that word defile means tarnish, corrupt, pollute, dishonor. It's the stuff that comes from the heart for out of the heart. Calm, evil thoughts.

And then he jumps straight to murder. That's the next step. Evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. They're just old fashioned, fancy words of saying we do bad stuff. We start lying. We start keeping secrets. We start getting angry. We start feeling resentful. We get guilty.

Just all of these bad things, things that we say. And then actions that we take out of that. Those all come from our heart and they are corrupting and polluting and they spoil us. And then he says, these are what to file a person. But eating with unwashed hands doesn't, so we can put that aside. He's saying this is more about your character.

So under the Jewish law that had had existed to that point and Pastor Kev touched on this a little bit, a lot of getting right with God and having a relationship with God was about ticking boxes. And if you ticked those boxes, then you were good. And then Jesus came along, born into the Jewish law, and then he came along and after a while he started teaching and he was saying, We're gonna close the book on that we no longer have to live under those laws.

We've got something new that's gonna start from here, and it's not gonna be about ticking boxes anymore. In fact, it's gonna be just two things now, instead of hundreds of laws that the Jewish people had to live under, it's just gonna be two things. Love God with all of your heart and your mind and your soul, and love your job and money, and.

No, what is it? Love God and love other people and love each other. So he's saying now what matters is that you just love God with your heart and you love the people around you. Now, the people around you are just as important in your relationship with God. The So if we don't want to tarnish, pollute, and dishonor ourselves and be influenced by poor emotions and, and things going on around us, and then by extension hurt people around us with our actions and our words, then we need some.

Guardrails. Okay, now you guys could probably tell me this cuz you've heard it four times already. What are guardrails? They are a system designed to keep vehicles from straying into dangerous or off limit areas. You've probably seen them, they're like metal. Fences, I guess on the road. And they are there so that if you're driving along and you crash into one or bump into one, you can course correct and get back into where it's safe, or it'll stop you from careening off into oncoming traffic or over the edge of a cliff.

If you are driving in the hinterland and it's one of those roads going up a mountain that just drops off, where's the guardrail? Is it teetering on the edge? Just right there. No, it's in the safety zone so that if you bump into it, you don't go over the edge and hurt yourself or someone else. So the guardrails are there to direct and protect.

They're there for our benefit to keep us going on the path that we're supposed to be going to and protect us. So then the big question is how do we use guardrails for something as intangible and ethereal as emotions and our heart? How do we stop negative emotions from starting and hurting other people?

How do we use guardrails for the stuff that's already in there? Okay, let's look at our heart. Close up. Can I please get my good looking helpers? Tom said he wouldn't help unless I said good looking. Just can you pop it up here on the corner. Thank you. It is extremely important that we don't spill that.

Tom, this brand new carpet up here. The carpet people are gonna go straight from evil thoughts to murder. If we, if we smell this, you right? Yep.

Oh, is it gonna say it gonna stay? All right, now we're good. We're good? Yes. I just won't touch it. Okay, so let's look at our heart. So we've got our cardiac, it's the aortic pump. It's also your inner soul. It's your emotional center. It's your personality. You would've been born with a certain personality slant.

That's great. We need every kind of personality. And then there's all of the fluff and stuff that then makes you, you. It's all of the things that you're so interested in. It's your quirks, it's your sense of humor. That's what makes you, you. It's your heart is what makes you uniquely the person that you are.

So then what makes us, if you're a Christian, our nice, very normal Christian selves then go out and say something really, really hurtful to someone that we love. What makes us go and do something that can destroy our marriage or our relationship with our kids? What makes us kind of maybe like it and enjoy it when we see someone else fail.

That's a really tough one. And I wouldn't say that's me all the time, but I have in the past enjoyed reading about people who win tens of millions of dollars in the lotto and lose it all. I dunno, so bad, isn't it? It's bad. It just makes me feel a bit better. I dunno. So anyway I didn't say I'm good at this, I'm just.

Teaching about it. Okay, so let's look at our heart. So let's just say that our heart is a sponge. I'm fully aware this is not a sponge. It turns out the earth doesn't make sponges as big as I need it. So we're using a cloth instead. So let's say the heart is absorbent. Okay? It, it absorbs. It learns. It's not shiny plastic, that everything just like falls right off.

We are influenced by everything in our life. From the moment we're born, so this is a brand new newborn baby heart. It's all white and clean. And then as we grow up, we're influenced by our parents, other people in our lives, our teachers, the people we work with, books we read, TV shows, we watch social media, you know, people that we follow.

All of those things, things have an influence, and some of them will be great and some of them will be negative. Now, this here says negative influence, and we're gonna put it right here. Okay? Maybe you had parents or a parent who was bitter or angry. Maybe you had a teacher who just said one thing that really derailed your confidence.

Maybe you had a boss who belittled you. Maybe you had friends who deeply hurt you. Maybe you were passed over for something that you really felt that you deserved and someone else got it instead. I. We can learn to become jealous of other people's success. We can learn to be dissatisfied with our own life.

We can learn to feel inferior and small. We can learn to be glass half empty people. We can learn to feel guilty for things that aren't even our fault, and we can learn that. We should never say sorry, and we should stay stubborn. Instead, we can learn to be ungrateful. That's all the stuff that we are influenced by.

Then what about stuff that's happening right now? That's present in your life. People do things that make us so angry and people that we love hurt us, and we can have a kind of pressure that squeezes us until we are just ready to snap. And remember Solomon said that everything in your heart flows from it, right?

It's all about the state of your heart and what our heart absorbs is what leaks out. It's the good and the bad. And that is like poison on your family

and on your friends and on your people that you work with. It's on what you present on social media. No one is exempt. It's on your family dog, whatever, right? It all leaks out. Nobody, not even innocent. Bystanders are immune to what our heart leaks out. That is how our heart was designed to be, and our job is to try to figure out a way to leak more of the good stuff because when that's happening, We're not loving people very well anymore.

We're hurting people because of the state of our heart, the influences that are in there. Thank you guys. Can you take that down very carefully. So I'm so nervous about knocking it off. Let's get rid of it. So here's the very interesting and kind of difficult thing about about our human heart. It's that the leak actually looks different to the heart issue.

So I'll explain that. So at at Christmas, I bought my 11 year old son a book for Christmas. And I've got the book here actually. It's a beautiful book. It's called Big Ideas for Curious Minds and Introduction to Philosophy. And he was like, oh, thank you mother. Oh, this is so fabulous. Please return that Nintendo Switch game.

I shall be too busy reading my book on philosophy. So he was not impressed. But we have been reading this. Book and it's absolutely beautiful. So philosophy is really just the art of big thinking about emotional intelligence. That's what it is. And we've been reading it and it's amazing how many times we've read a chapter and gone, Hey, remember when Jesus talked about that?

Or when Jesus demonstrated that. And there's a chapter in this called Know Yourself that goes through exactly this. So I thought I would demonstrate it the way that this book does cuz it does it so well. So this is a kid's book, so the, the. Example is a kids example, but we've all been school kids if we're not right now.

So it's a good example. Imagine that you came home from school, chucked your stuff on the ground, went into the kitchen, started stuffing your face, right? Happens at three 30 every afternoon across every Australian household. And mom says, oh, hey buddy, can you just pop your bag away when you're done? And you turn around and go, no, I don't wanna, I'm hungry, I'm gonna eat.

All right. And no, I don't wanna do that. You can just go away. I'm gonna do something else. Okay, so did Mom deserve that? No. She's been pretty nice to you actually since she picked you up. So why did you snap like that? And it may not be, and probably isn't, that mom's the worst person in the world for asking you to put your bag away.

It's actually that something may have happened that morning. Maybe a friend did something that made you angry or you got left out of a game that all your other friends went and played. Or maybe the day before you got a, a grade on an assignment that. Wasn't great and you know that you didn't put in the effort.

So you feel guilty and you know, mom's gonna kind of go, mm, should've put in more effort. So then you snap at mom later about a bag. And the way that the book described this, this is my puppet. I didn't realize this was a puppet until last night. I can literally do this if I want to, but I won't cuz it's not a comedy show.

But the way that the book explained it was, That when we hurt someone with our words and our actions, it's like the teeth, it's the bite, but the problem is not necessarily here at the head. We have to follow it all the way down to the tail to find out what's really going on. Because these two things may be completely separate from each other.

The cause is not like, like the end result is not actually the real issue. So when someone comes to you with good news about some success they've had and on the outside just smiling, going, ah, that's so great. And then later you go and snap at one of your kids. Because you feel envious that they've done so well.

Or when you're having a very normal, nice day with your family, everything's great. And then someone sends you a text message and it's your family and they're trying to pick a fight with you, and they're annoying. And so then suddenly your husband becomes the most infuriating person in the world, and you're just like, Jo Jojo at them the whole time because of this.

Or when you feel kind of small and inferior compared to someone And so then you go and you will undermine someone else. You will say something nasty about someone or discredit them because that kind of makes you feel a little bit better. Or when you've done the wrong thing and you know it and you feel guilty, so then you shut down.

Or even worse, you go and get angry at the person that you did wrong to because somehow that's like a self-protective thing, makes us feel better instead of guilty. So, I have, I mean, okay. I have examples that I could share with you from literally this week. I'm so bad at this. I don't think anyone is immune to this.

Every one of us could get up and share an example of how we've lashed out about something that was completely separate. But this is a good example. So I'll share this one. A few years ago, I was at Robina with my kids. I have three kids. My youngest at the time, I think was maybe like two and a half, three years old, and we were doing the shopping.

We came out at the Kohl's end, and when you go out, it's one of those ones, you go at the sliding door and you have to turn immediately left, follow the path, and then go across the crossing and right in front of you. And there's just a couple of BA trades in front of you is a road that cars go along obviously, but it's the road that they've come into from the main road.

So they're not slowing down to find a car park. They are going somewhat fast down there cuz they don't need to be slow. So anyway, we go out, the two boys are ahead of me. They turn left Josie, my. Two and a half, three year old. She's holding onto the trolley because I'm a good parent. And so we on the trolley and I turn left with the trolley, and Josie let's go and just runs onto the road.

And I don't know what I did. I think I yelled her name. I was in absolute shock. There was a white car, a four wheel drive coming down this road towards her slammed on the brakes. Josie must've either seen the car or heard me yell. She turns around and runs back in front of the car towards me. I grabbed her.

I'm just saying, Josie, you can't do that. You can't do that. I mean, she's. So little she doesn't know it's not her fault. Anyway, the lady in the car pulls up and she winds down the window near me and she said, okay. She said, thank goodness I stopped. That's all, that's what she said. She was a very lovely lady.

Probably in her early fifties. In, in hindsight, I understand that what she was really saying was, phew. That was close. Wow. Thank goodness I was able to stop in time. That was close. That's great that it all turned out okay. That's what she was saying. This is how I responded. Well, you know what? There's three of them and one of me, and I don't have a hundred eyes and a hundred hands to keep them next to me all the time.

Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And I was just like holding my daughter, this poor woman. She looked so confused. Then she looked really angry and then she went like this and she like drove off hard, you know, like that real down the road and we could say, okay. We could say that. Okay. And fair enough that I responded to this poor woman out of shock, you know, because I had bit her.

I was shocked, I was scared. If you have ever looked after a child who has run onto the road, it is one of the most frightening experiences you can ever have. Yes, I'm sure there was an element of that, but I thought about it later cuz I was like, that was such a weirdly disproportionate. Response to that woman and I felt really guilty cuz I had no way, I still cannot apologize to her.

Four or five years later, I still feel terrible about it. So over the next couple of days, I followed the snake a little and I tried to find the tail and I did work it out. Do you wanna know what it's, yeah. Social media. You didn't expect that, did you? Social media first had, its like the heyday like when it started was 2007 with MySpace.

Yep. Will had MySpace accounts before Facebook and Instagram. And my first son was born in 2008, a year later. So we are of the first generation of parents to raise our kids in a digital era full of social media. And here's the message that social media, especially in the early days where we didn't know, we didn't know how to navigate social media.

Well, we didn't understand what a vacuum it is. We didn't understand what a mirage it is. A lot of, well, and to this day, still social media. The keyboard warriors out there will give you the message. They will drum it into you as a parent that you are and should be ashamed and guilty of your parenting style regardless of what that is.

And I'm seeing moms nodding and they fo, they focus it mainly on moms. We are told that we cannot do it right, that everything we do is wrong. That we are either helicopter parenting our kids or we are negligent. We get messages. You know, you see these comments and they're saying you should never have been able to breed like, these poor moms make a mistake.

And they are vilified globally. It is horrific the kind of hate that women get, particularly women about parenting. And then of course you've got the comparison. There were people putting up photos, mums putting up photos of like, oh, I'm baking with my two year old. It's the best thing ever. Hashtag is so blessed.

Remember that that was a thing. Oh, oh my gosh. But you know that that was up there, that we didn't understand what a lie that was yet. And so we would see that. I would see that, and I'd be there with my kids having absolutely meltdowns on the floor while I'm trying to make dinner and I'm crying and I'm like, I, why am I not loving this?

Why I feel so guilty? Because I don't love this all the time. And then there are people in real life. Who now feel that it is okay to come up to you and in your face, yell at you and tell you that you are the worst parent and that you should be ashamed. And yes, I've had multiple people do that, and they were all men for things that my kids were not even doing wrong.

One got mad cause I, my son was climbing into a car seat by himself and he was about six, I don't even know. So I realized that I was living under the influence of what social media was telling me. I had no confidence in myself. I felt guilty. I felt ashamed. I felt like I was failing in every single way.

So when that poor lady said, thank goodness, I stopped, what I heard was, what? Of course, of course you negligent stupid woman. Of course, I had to be there to protect your child because you are not capable of it. Thank goodness for me. That's what I heard and that's what I responded to. That's not the tale that you were expecting, was it?

It took me by surprise too. So I had to make a decision then. Am I going to put my confidence into a billion keyboard warriors who dunno anything about me and my family? Am I gonna put my confidence into comparison against a snapshot of someone's life? And I'm pretty sure that that baking did not end well with their two year olds.

Right. Am I gonna put my confidence in a few cowardly men who find women an easy target? No. I'm gonna go back to putting confidence in myself and in my husband, in the fact that we go back to Jesus every time and say, God, how do we do this better? How do we love our kids better? And we are honest with our kids when we make mistakes and I don't listen to all that garbage.

I feel very sorry for people who feel that they need to be so judgmental on social media. So we don't do that anymore. So, Jesus said, what comes out of your mouth comes from your heart and it's going to inflict injury on people around you unless we take care of it. So take care of the heart. Let's drip more of the good stuff, less of the bad stuff.

So what can we do? We set up some. Guardrails. So they're gonna help us identify when that feeling, when that emotion is there, something negative before we get to the bite stage. Cuz remember the guardrails are in the safety zone. So when we bump up against that guardrail and we go, Ooh, what? Where's that anger coming from?

Where's that guilt? Why am I feeling resentful? Why am I feeling a bit uncomfortable in this situation? Why am I thinking about doing something with that person that I shouldn't be doing? I. When we feel that feeling, that's when we stop and we start to ask ourselves some questions and we say, why am I feeling that?

Where is it coming from? Where is the tail going? What do I do instead of that action that I was about to do, who do I need to talk to? What do I need to confess to myself or to someone else and make it right and say, sorry, what secret am I keeping secrets? Love to leak. Where are my priorities? Am I thinking about money too much like Len was talking about?

Am I being influenced by people around me? Like Megs was talking about? Am I getting very close to some boundaries I shouldn't be getting close to like Pastor Kev was talking about last week, who have I hurt? Then we follow the snake to find the tail. And you might find that it's a learned behavior and influence that you grew up with, that you kind of need to go back and dig out.

You might be able to do that yourself. You may need a little bit of help. Counseling, therapy, those things are great for helping you to see past things that are hard for us to see ourselves when we're in it. And we also have a program at church here at the junction that we run called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.

It's a very painful way of doing it, but so worth it. I've done it a couple of times. It's really excellent cuz sometimes we do need a little bit of help. So the point of the guardrail is to alert you before the snake bites someone else and you hurt the people around you. And it's also there to let you know when a negative influence is starting to get into your heart to protect.

Remember, it's to direct and protect. So for example this is a bit of a silly example, but a few years ago I was watching a show and I can't remember the name of the show or I'd warn you, but it had a lot of swearing in it and I thought, That's fine. It's just me watching it. I'm a mature adult. I can handle some swearing.

It's fine. Anyway, I found as I was watching this show, I started to have like swear words sitting in the front of my mind. They were in my, my mental dialogue, almost like l e d, like words running in the front of my head. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. I think that's coming from that show, and it's a very short journey from here.

To coming out of my mouth. Right? So I stopped watching the show and it cleared up and everything was fine. But that's just an example of being aware that, okay, something's having a little bit of a negative influence. It's something that I'm doing. It's an activity that I'm participating in. It's someone that I'm hanging out with.

That's the guardrail. That's what it's there for to help you recognize so we can course correct and adjust and remove it or talk to someone about it and rise above it like Megs was talking about, you might have people who are a bad influence in your life. You either move away from them if you can, but the other thing you can do is make sure that you've got accountability so that you are being a good influence on them rather than being influenced by them.

So putting up guardrails, being aware means we can prevent the moments when our hearts leak out of other people, and we say and do things that hurt others because remember that how we treat other people matters to God because he said, just love God, love people. So it is our responsibility to make sure that we are not hurting people accidentally because our heart has a few things in it that are just starting to leak out.

Above all else, guard your heart and that protects you and your relationship with God as well. So across this series, I've loved this series. I was just saying to Pastor Kev before that quite a few times over the last few weeks, I've had moments where I've thought, oh, that's something that requires a boundary.

That's something I've gotta think about putting a guardrail up around. And You know, if you are someone who's just visiting today, or you've been a few times and you wouldn't say that you're a Christian, you don't, you know, follow Jesus, then you're welcome to listen to a message like this and go, that's great, but you're not under any obligation to follow it, but.

If you are someone who would say that you are a Christ follower, that you have said yes to Jesus, then this actually is our responsibility to do these kinds of things. There was an amazing act all through this. I've thought of something that Paul, so Paul was someone who wrote a lot of the letters and documents that make up the New Testament part of the Bible.

They've all been collated together, and one thing he wrote that I've thought about a lot is everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. And this is the thing about living in this post Jesus time where there we don't have the laws that they had before. We actually have incredible freedom.

I know before I came to church, I thought, Churches were all about rules. You've gotta do this and wear this, and you can't say that you can't do this. And then I came to a church like this when I was nearly 20, and after a while I realized actually, no, this is like breathing fresh air. I feel like I can properly breathe again.

Because there aren't any rules. You can actually do anything you want. It's just that not everything is gonna be beneficial for you, your heart, your relationship with God, and the people around you. So it's our responsibility to work out well. What is beneficial. What does my heart need in this moment? How can I love someone around me that needs a little bit of love?

And that's why I think I've loved this series so much because it's made me remember, again, that not everything is beneficial and that it's up to us to put those protective boundaries in place to make sure that we're directing ourselves. Towards into a life that really does follow Jesus as much as possible.

Jesus was not about rules. He was a rebel. He was a rule breaker. He loved people so much. He was so joyful. He came alongside and he had dinner with, and he hugged people who were outcast from society. He gave a voice to women and children when they had none. He was the greatest champion of all kinds of people from every walk of life.

He loved so deeply.

He wasn't about rules, he was all about the heart. So I asked the team if this morning we could just, just for a couple of minutes, just reflect on that and this morning and the last few weeks and just have a think. Is there something that may be. You need to adjust a little bit in your heart, and if you do, that is totally okay because that's the point.

We are lifelong learners of Jesus. You're not gonna get it right and be a Stepford wife going, yay for the rest of your life. That's not gonna happen. You're not gonna be a robot. There's always gonna be stuff that we need to work out. That's part of the journey. It's part of the growth. So just take a couple of minutes now to have a think about.

That if you want to, you can just sit and listen to this beautiful music. You can just sit and remember how amazing Jesus is and what he does for us every single day. Because he came really to change us on the inside. So this is freely available for everyone who wants it. Anyone who wants to change can do that, and then that's when we find the freedom, because then we're moving into things that are beneficial for us.

So thank you so much everyone for coming on board the journey these last few weeks. It really has been a great series. It is all available online if you missed any. And I'll just pray as we finish up and then the team can take it. Thanks guys. Jesus, thank you so much for everything that you showed us and taught us.

Even though we're, we're reading a lot about it from, from things that were written 2000 years ago, but the most amazing thing is that you actually are still here. Even though you left Earth, you have never left us that you live in us, that you are right here. The second that we ask for help, you are already here, ready and waiting, waiting to change, waiting to step in.

And that. There is just no distance between us, Jesus, when we ask for help. So I pray that just as people have listened over these last few weeks, that you would direct us and, and, and just give us the the wisdom to know where to set up these guardrails, where to put them, where, where we're already maybe being influenced in some way that we need to come back and get right with you.

And so I just really thank you so much for the wisdom that's been shared and we just wanna spend these few minutes just. Kind of thinking of you and giving it all back to you, Jesus, and asking that you do work in us and highlight things to us. Thank you Jesus. Amen.