Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 1 · January 1
Guard the Source
“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”
The phone in your pocket is locked. It takes six numbers or your face to open it, and it locks again so quickly that it annoys you. Yet the worst that losing it could cost you is some money and some embarrassment.
Today's verse begins with a word worth staying with: "Keep." It is a guard's word. The Hebrew word is natsar, and it describes what a soldier does on a city wall, or what a watchman does in a vineyard while the fruit is ripe enough to steal. In Hebrew the line is also a comparison. It says, in effect, of all the things you keep watch over, keep watch over this one most. Set your heart beside everything else you own, and it goes at the top.
The reason given is about flow: "for out of it are the issues of life." Issues are what flows out, like water running from a spring on down the hill. That is why the chapter surrounds this line with parts of the body. In the verses just before it, the father speaks of the ear and the eyes. In the verses just after it, he speaks of the mouth, the eyelids and the feet. Each of those is a gate. In the middle of them, the father stops naming gates and names the spring they all flow from.
So put the two side by side. You guard your phone because you know exactly what losing it would cost, yet hardly anyone guards the heart. We assume that what is in there is private and will stay inside, but it does not stay inside. It has been flowing into your words and choices since before breakfast, and you cannot replace it by calling the bank. The same chapter shows how to guard it: keep wise words "in the midst of thine heart," because "they are life unto those that find them." And Proverbs says where that wisdom comes from: "For the LORD giveth wisdom." You guard the spring best by filling it with what God gives.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 1 is Unflinching Light (Psalm 27:1).