I have written more rules about AI than I ever expected to. I write them for my students, talk them through with colleagues, and revise them whenever something new comes out and last semester's wording stops fitting.
Those rules matter, and I can say why each one is there. But they are the easy part, which may be why we keep returning to them: what is allowed, what has to be disclosed, what has to be verified. None of those questions touches the one I actually find hard.
What does my heart want?
Everything Flows From It
Proverbs 4:23 says, Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. I have read that verse for years without noticing how much weight the last phrase carries. Everything. Not just the obvious things or the things we label spiritual, but also how I use a tool that is always one tab away.
In Scripture the heart is not simply where we keep our feelings. It is the center of what we love, what we want, and what we trust, and Proverbs tells us to guard it above all else. The reason the verse gives is that everything we do flows out of it. The verses just after it tell us to watch our mouths, our eyes, and our steps, and they come second because conduct is downstream. So by the time I open the tool, something further up has already been at work.
What Are We Asking For?
If everything flows from the heart, then whether a use is permitted can't be the only question. Often the better question, and the harder one, is what I want the tool to give me.
Am I asking for help, or for a kind of control I was never promised? Am I trying to do the work well, or trying to look like someone who can? Am I reaching for AI because it serves the thing in front of me, or because I have started to assume that anything slow or inconvenient should simply be removed?
None of that makes efficiency suspicious. Some work should be easier, some friction is simply waste, and there's no virtue in doing something the hard way because it's hard. But there is a difference between accepting useful help and asking a machine for something deeper: certainty, or competence, or relief from a responsibility that is still mine to carry. No policy is going to settle that.
Where Wisdom Begins
Proverbs 9:10 doesn't say wisdom begins with understanding the tool, weighing the risk, or mastering the rules. It begins with the fear of the Lord, and that matters because the fear of the Lord puts everything else in its proper place. God is God. We are not. We are His creatures, answerable to Him for what we love and what we do. AI, then, has to remain in its proper place. It is a tool to be used, not the source of our identity or our security, and not an escape from what is ours to answer for.
Maybe that's what guarding the heart looks like right now: not suspicion toward every convenience, and not treating technology as a threat, but paying attention to what we are asking of it and noticing whether we have quietly begun to expect more from it than a tool was ever meant to provide.
The questions about disclosure and verification and permission still matter. Underneath them sit older ones. What do I love? What do I trust? And have I asked this tool for something that was never its to give?