For The Win Week 3 Dig Deeper

FOR THE WIN – Week 3

Have you ever had an obsession? Maybe it was that band you loved, or that time you signed up for a Starbucks reward card and now you’re one step away from hooking yourself up to a coffee-filled IV, or that show on Netflix you binge-watched for seventeen straight hours. It’s funny how obsessions can creep up on us.

Of course, it’s entirely normal to crave things that we enjoy.But what happens when we overindulge our cravings? (The desire to be liked, to win, or to make money becomes dangerous it’s overindulged.) What do we do when we crave things that are unhealthy for us? And how do we regain self-control when we discover we’ve become obsessed with fulfilling our ever-growing appetites for the things we crave?

Solomon, the wisest person to ever live, says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23 NIV). We need to guard what goes into our hearts, and we need to guard what our hearts are telling us to do, because sometimes the desires of our hearts are not good for us. We can’t always trust our appetites. So how do we guard our hearts?

It begins by identifying our unhealthy appetites and choose to starve them. One step further is to share it with someone in order to have them help hold us accountable. Our heart is the well-spring of life, and since it affects everything about us, we need to stop following our heart, and we need to choose to guard it instead.

We get a taste for something we enjoy, we indulge that taste a little more, and before we know it, we’ve pretending not to notice that we’ve lost track of how many times Netflix has asked, “Are you still watching?” (Stop judging us, Netflix, seriously.)