How Does Your Garden Grow?
How Does Your Garden Grow? • Month One — The Gardener’s Assignment
Month One
How Does Your Garden Grow?
The Gardener’s Assignment: From Contrary to Commissioned
A Three-Month Devotional Study in Proverbs 4:20–23
by Elder Robert Warring
Let them not depart from your sight; keep them in the center of your heart.” Proverbs 4:20–21 (AMPC)
Month 1 of 3 • Guard It. Grow It. Give It.
About This Devotional
Guard It. Grow It. Give It. is a three-month devotional study rooted in Proverbs 4:20–23 and framed through the familiar lens of the nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.” Each month takes you deeper into one essential dimension of the cultivated heart.
Month 1 – The Gardener’s Assignment: diagnosis, design, and the call to attend.
Month 2 – The Guard’s Commission: defense, surrender, and the cost of an unguarded heart.
Month 3 – The Harvest & The Revelation: fruit, freedom, and giving from a grace-grown life.
Use each month’s devotional for personal study, small group discussion, or counseling support. The reflection questions at the close of each month are designed to move the Word from the head into the soil of real life.
How Does Your Garden Grow?
From Contrary to Cultivated: A Study in Proverbs 4:20–23
You learned the rhyme before you learned to read. You sang it before you understood it. But what if that little nursery song has been carrying a prophetic indictment all along?
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.”
-Traditional English Nursery Rhyme
Four lines. One devastating diagnosis.
Mary is contrary – she is opposed, resistant, running against the grain of what she was designed to grow. Her garden exists, yes. But look what is filling it: silver bells, cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.
The question the rhyme poses is the same question The Holy Spirit asks every soul that will be still enough to hear it: How does your garden grow?
Proverbs 4:20–23 answers the question Mary never could. It gives us not only the diagnosis of the contrary heart, but the divine prescription for the cultivated one.
The Prescription in Proverbs
21 Let them not depart from your sight; keep them in the center of your heart.
22 For they are life to those who find them, healing and health to all their flesh.
23 Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flow the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:20–23 (AMPC)
Word Studies
To prick up the ears; to be alert, attentive, inclined. Attending to God’s Word is not passive reading – it is active, postured obedience.
To stretch out, to bend, to incline. Contrary means bent away. Natah means bent toward.
The inner man: the seat of the will, intellect, emotion, and moral compass. What rules the heart rules the life.
To watch, to preserve, to keep watch as a sentinel. This is not casual maintenance – it is militarized vigilance.
A guard post; a place of custody. Guard your heart the way a sentry guards what must not be breached.
Everything that flows out of you — your words, decisions, relationships, and legacy — originates in the garden of your guarded or unguarded heart.
Guard It. Grow It. Give It.
A Biblical Study for the Contrary Heart That Longs to Be Cultivated
I. The Gardener’s Assignment: From Contrary to Commissioned
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary – How does your garden grow?”
The very first question the rhyme asks is the question every soul must eventually face. Not “how do you look?” Not “do you attend church?” Not “do you know the right answers?” But: how does your garden grow?
The Lord God didn’t call you to a casual, careless, or comfortable Christian life. He called you to tend. To till. To be tenacious about the territory of your own inner world.
You are a gardener. Your garden is your heart — the command center of your entire existence. Everything that grows in your life is directly determined by what you allow to take root in that ground.
Neglect the garden and the weeds will preach for you.
Reflection & Application
Take time this month to sit with these questions. Let them move from the mind into the soil of honest self-examination.
- Where in your life have you been planting silver bells — spiritual activity that makes noise but produces no nourishment in you or in others?
- What is the contrary thing in you — the place where your will is bent away from God rather than toward Him? Name it specifically and without defense.
- What would it look like this week to posture yourself with qashab — ears alert, will inclined, whole self-bending toward the Word of God rather than away from it?
and above all that you guard,
for out of it flow the springs of life.”
Proverbs 4:23 (AMPC)
