Counting the Casualty of Warfare-- The Shepherd’s Pouch: The Heart

Create in me a clean heart, O God, And renew a steadfast spirit within me. Psalm 51:10

David placed the stones inside of a shepherd’s pouch. What was a shepherd’s pouch? Simply put it was a purse, or as men would put it today, “a man bag”, only it was open most of the time, easily reached into, and easy to draw out of when David needed something in a hurry, and in the case of Goliath, he needed that stone in a hurry. Another way to think of it was a pocket. It was just a little thing that hung along his side that held what he needed. Yet there’s a lot to be said about that pouch, about that little something, that held that all important pellet of divine retribution. There’s a lot to be said about what holds those weapons we’ve covered in our study thus far: the word, prayer, worship, fellowship, and service. What is it we put those weapons of Christian warfare into? Our Great Shepherd’s pouch, that little thing He gave us to put them in, is our hearts.

One of the things we need to know about our heart is that God made it in the image of His own. Our hearts, like His, were meant to love. He meant it to be free to love Him as much as He loves us, in purity of spirit. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Deut.6:5 He gave us this ability to choose between loving him and loving something else or someone else. Regardless of what we choose to pursue in love, we were made to go after it ‘whole heartedly’.  Free will can be a triumph for God, or, because of the fall, a curse on man.

If left on our own, we will blow it. During the fall we saw this in full display, and we’ve seen it continue to roll upon us like a tsunami ever since. When God called to mankind in the garden “where are you?”, it wasn’t because He didn’t know. It was because He was pointing out positionally where we’d gotten to; to a place where we could no longer reach into the pouch and find the weapon we needed to defeat the enemy who would tear us limb from limb, who was set on destroying what God intended for good. We were created for good. Our hearts were created to be like His heart, but we sinned and use our choice to go after other things, other gods.

Our purses get full of clutter, some big clutter and some fluff like used tissues and old receipts for nickel and dime stuff. Have you ever been in a hurry to find something and been embarrassed by the things that fall out of your purse or pocket? Those items you keep in there that you wish you didn’t have to keep on you, but at the wrong moment out they pop when what you meant to pull out was something innocent like a pen or your cell phone. Somehow everyone in the room finds out what your medication is, or that you forgot to take that movie back to Redbox, the one that your nephew got that you would never have rented, but since you were going that way you agreed to drop it, but forgot all about it…a month ago, and now you own it because you ended up having to pay for it. Or who knows what else comes out. Oh, the humiliation if you should drop your purse and spill everything out!

Such is the case with our hearts. The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?  I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings. Jer. 17:9-10  We fill our lives with these other idols. We think some things are useful to us only to find that in time they turn to rubbish, so they need to be replaced with something newer and shiny that becomes old and rusty. We are never satisfied, because all that we try to fill our hearts with are not what they were created to be filled up with. There’s a song that says there’s a God shaped hole in all our hearts, which is so true, so why do we put so many other things before Him?

The first commandment begins with a prefix, “I AM the Lord, Your GOD.” Exodus 20: 2. It can sound rather demanding if that’s all we read, but the next part of the verse shows the love He holds for us. “Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  Egypt was a place God originally provided as symbol of the world, to give provision for the house of Israel during a time of famine, but not to live in forever. That was not their intended homeland. Still, He remained faithful. They went in as a family and came out as a nation. He did that. God provided for them amazingly. Yet, while there, because of what He did in blessing them, they were enslaved due to the fear of the Egyptians. Faithfully, He brought them out of their shackles and freed them, bringing them through the parted waters, with signs and wonders of which there was no doubt there was a mighty God in Israel. This was love. His words are not demanding. I AM, is not demanding, it is loving. As you struggle in your times of need you may think, “But who is going to take care of this for me?” The Lord answers, “I AM.”

Our hearts are to be empty until filled by the Lord. Psalm 37:4 says “Delight yourself also in the Lord, And He shall give you the desires of your heart.” If we put the Lord Jesus first, not just first, put optimal in our lives, He will fill us with the desires for our heart that He wants us to have. It won’t be about us doing what we want, but about what God would have us do. David didn’t go to the battle thinking he was going to beat down Goliath. He went in knowing that God was going to defeat the enemy of His people. He knew because of what was in His heart, what was in His Shepherd’s pouch.

As you struggle in your times of spiritual warfare you may think, “But who is going to take care of this enemy for me?” The Lord God answers, “I AM.”