Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the morning mindset. This is our opportunity to get our

minds aligned for the truth of God for this day. So whether you're waking up early in the

morning or perhaps you were a swing shift and you're getting up some other time of day,

this is your opportunity. Stop for a moment. Think about your opportunity to align yourself

with the way God thinks about you and about your day and about the things ahead. Today

we're going to be looking at Proverbs 17 verses 1 through 3 and we're going to understand a little

bit more about our own hearts. Isn't that a vital thing for us to know? Knowing ourselves better,

many times, it enables us to see God's work in our life and to see the motives that are happening

inside that aren't necessarily in alignment with God's way of thinking. So let's dive in. Proverbs 17,

1 through 3 says, better is a dry, morsel with quiet than a house full of feasting with strife. A

servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully and will share the inheritance

as one of the brothers. The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold and the Lord tests

the hearts. So you see where the title for this episode testing your heart comes from.

During that last verse where it says, God is testing our hearts and he's not doing it like a

true false or or multiple choice test that you might have had in school. It's not that kind of

test. There's no testing of your knowledge or your ability to do something. This rather is a

different use of the word testing and that last verse describes it. It says the crucible is for

silver and the furnace is for gold. Now those are terms that come from a refinery kind of a

process where they are burning out imperfections in the silver and in the gold and that process is

often called testing as well. And so when you take that imagery and you see what the Lord is doing,

he is putting our hearts into situations where he's able to burn out of us so to speak,

the things that are not good, the things that we would consider to be imperfections if you want

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