Proverbs 4:25
Let your eyes look straight ahead;
Fix your gaze directly before you.
Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.
Now days it seems to get harder and harder to look ahead. We seem to either look behind us or not want to look at all.
Earlier on this passage it mentions to guard your heart for everything you do flows from it. We hear that passage often, but do we really know what it means to guard our heart?
It's something you put up a wall, a boundary line that stops before anyone can even come near. It's guarding something in one’s possession, watching as one would something precious, continually observing attentively. The hebrew word for heart is levav it includes our thoughts, our will, our discernment, and our affections.
Another translation says: to guard your heart for out it flows the issues of life.
You see, guarding your heart is the first step, if you let things of this world enter, it slowly begins to infect. Just like a disease that spreads, it will spread and begin to flow out of you. You need to treat your heart with the protection it needs. Stand guard and fight against any unwholesome talk or preverse speech, any lie, any past issue, any anxiety, any fear. All of it is connected to what you let in. The goal is to look ahead, look to Jesus when you're afraid, when you can't seem to step beyond your past, when your not sure what's going to happen next, when the storms of life come, Jesus is the one we need to look to. God is the strength of your heart.
Psalm 73:21-26
When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you. Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. Whom I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.