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Series: Inspiration in Isaiah, #11 September 17, 2006
GOD WANTS YOUR HEART Isaiah 29:13
I. A New Heart Ezekiel 36:26 A. A heart of flesh One of the most attractive things about the gospel of Jesus Christ is not just that He offers to save us from the eternal consequences of our rebellion against God, but that He says He will give us a new heart, a new nature. God said it this way through the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel (36:26), “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” When we come to faith in Jesus Christ, God gives us a new heart to love Him, a heart that is soft toward the things of God. One of the most amazing miracles any of us have ever seen is the change God can make in a person who gives their life to Him. They can change from rebels against God to loyal soldiers; from someone who is completely apathetic about God to one who is passionately in love with Him; from one who is selfish and self-absorbed to one who is loving and giving and caring toward others. B. Deceitful hearts Jeremiah 17:9; Rom 7:15-20 Unfortunately, this new heart does not completely replace the old one. From the time we become followers of Christ until the time He calls us home, we live in a certain tension that is created by the fact that we have two natures—two hearts—within us. One loves God and wants only to serve and please Him; the other is all about self. It is self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-seeking, etc. Jeremiah said it this way, 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” We have probably all experienced this in many different ways. We hear ourselves say one thing when we mean another; we take things from the office that aren’t ours, and rationalize it by saying the company can afford it, and besides, they don’t pay us enough; we lash out at our spouse with a hurtful comment; we find ourselves feeling covetous and greedy when we are around others who have more than we do. And the worst of it all is that we really don’t understand where all these things come from. There is, as Paul said, something in us that is not the real us, a sinful nature that has not completely been replaced or removed. Romans 7:15-17, 19-20 (NLT), “I don't understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate. [16] I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience shows that I agree that the law is good. [17] But I can't help myself, because it is sin inside me that makes me do these evil things. [19] When I want to do good, I don't. And when I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. [20] But if I am doing what I don't want to do, I am not really the one doing it; the sin within me is doing it.” So even though God has given us a new heart, and the real us is being created in the image of Christ, there is still a part of us that is deceitful. It is determined to go the wrong way, and we have to fight it all the time. That’s why it is so important to guard our new hearts God has given us, and to protect them from the influences of the world, the flesh, and the devil. C. Guard your heart Proverbs 4:23 Proverbs 4:23, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Everything we do comes from our heart. It is the seat of emotions, and will, and desire. It is the center of our character, our personality, our mind. This heart has been created anew, in the image of Christ, for those who are His followers, and it is our responsibility to guard it from everything that would try to corrupt it, or lead it away from Christ. How can we guard our hearts? I think the image of the guard standing at the door to the Oval Office with a gun is appropriate here. His job is to make sure that no unauthorized people enter that office. We guard our hearts by protecting and defending them from any intrusions from the evil one. So we have to pay strict attention to what we watch and what we listen to, because the eyes and the ears are the primary doors into our hearts.. What is it the enemy most often uses to insert ungodly things into your heart and mind? Is it movies, or TV, or video games, or the internet? Magazines, or books? The music you listen to? The jokes or gossip of your friends? What kind of things are you allowing in to your heart? Do they make you love God more, and want to please Him? Do they draw you closer to Him, or make you feel farther away? The other enemy is within our own deceitful hearts. We have to guard ourselves against the thoughts that sometimes bubble unbidden to the surface: the things that are driven by lust, greed, anger, bitterness, critical spirit, arrogance, deceitfulness, jealousy, selfishness, fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, discouragement, low self-esteem, etc. All these things come from inside us, but we have to guard our hearts against them as well. So Paul advises us in Philip. 4:8, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” Whenever our thoughts and attitudes veer off into negative territory, we have to steer them back onto the highway of holiness, and insist that we only think of positive things. Because if we allow our minds to dwell on these negative things, they will poison our hearts, and we’ll become negative. “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”
One of the major themes of many of the Old Testament prophets was that the people of God had become trapped in a legalistic view of their relationship with God that centered almost entirely on the outward trappings and rituals of their faith. They came to believe that if they circumcised their baby boys, and didn’t work on the Sabbath, and offered sacrifices, that would make them right with God, and He would automatically bless them and protect them. This attitude made them something they would never have admitted: hypocrites. II. Hypocrites Isaiah 29:13 “The Lord says: ‘These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men.’” Their hypocrisy was in the fact that while they went through the motions of worship, they were not truly worshiping, because worship is something that is done in the heart. It may have an outward expression, but if all you have is the outward expression, you do not have worship, you have someone pretending to worship, which is hypocrisy. They may even think they are worshiping, but they are not. The people of Isaiah’s day were going through the motions, doing what the priests taught them to do, but their hearts were far from God. They said all the right things, they did the right things, but their hearts were wrong, so they did not please God. Over and over again in the Scriptures we see that God wants our hearts. Certainly He wants our obedience and service and so on, but all of that without the heart is empty hypocrisy. Jesus encountered much the same thing during His ministry, and called the people on it. In Mark 7:6-13, He said that Isaiah had been right when he spoke about the people as hypocrites, and then He quoted this passage from 29:13. Jesus went on to say, “Mark 7:8 You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men.” … [10] For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’… [11] But you say that if a man says to his father or mother: ‘Whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is Corban’ (that is, a gift devoted to God), [12] then you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. [13] Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.” In Isaiah’s day, the problem was that the people obeyed the outward observances of the law without putting their hearts into their worship. In Jesus’ day, He pointed out that human traditions had crept into their religious life and had actually supplanted the commandment of God. This reminds us of the danger of putting too much emphasis on traditions of the church. This is one of the reasons I am somewhat cautious, and even skeptical at times, about certain aspects of the theology of the Roman Catholic Church: they hold the Scripture and the traditions of the Church as of equal value. But Jesus points out how those traditions can stray away from the original intentions of God on which they may be based, and eventually lead us into the kind of hypocrisy where we may say we are following God, but in fact, we are really following men. What do you think? Can this sort of thing happen to us in the evangelical Protestant church? Can we become hypocrites in the same ways as the people Isaiah or Jesus preached to? I think we can. I have some broad generalizations about our two services, which I’m going to say to both services, knowing that there will be people in each one who fit the pattern of the other. Since I don’t know your heart, I’m not speaking about anyone in particular. But if the shoe fits, I urge you to wear it. Ask the Spirit if this applies to you. Here’s how I think this might apply to many of those in the first service: I know that many of you are not very expressive in your faith; you find it hard to show much emotion outwardly about anything. But friends, if you do not feel something when you worship, you are in danger of hypocrisy. If you are just going through the motions, if you are just “going to church” instead of worshiping God with your heart, if you do it largely out of habit, or to see others and be seen, but your heart is not in it, you’re in trouble. Jesus said the Father is seeking those who will worship Him in “spirit and in truth”, and it seems to me that the danger in this service is that we could have the truth, and not as much of the spirit as we need. Here’s how I think this might apply to you in the second service: You may get all caught up in the worship, and find it a truly emotional experience, but when you leave here, your heart is unchanged; you can be just as self-centered and sinful as you were when you came in. All you did was get a spiritual-emotional “fix” for the week. You may be a lot more outwardly expressive of your faith than the older generation, but as Isaiah pointed out, if all you have are the outward expressions, and your heart is not in it, you are in trouble, too. The words may be right, the rapturous expression on your face may be right, but your heart can be wrong. In this service, you may have more of the spirit, but less of the truth than we need.
III. The Great Commandment Mark 12:29,30 One time a teacher of the law asked Jesus which was the greatest of all the commandments. They had hundreds of commandments in the Old Testament, and this man legitimately wanted to know which one was most important to keep. Mark 12:29-30, "The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. [30] Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’” We sometimes analyze each of these words individually—heart, soul, mind, and strength—looking for different shades of meaning in them. But really, these are just different aspects of our heart: the soul or personality, the mind or intellect, and the strength or physical life. There are many things God tells us to do in His Word, but this is the most important of them all: love God with all your heart, with everything in you. I sometimes get a little frustrated with people who claim to be Christians, but whose lives do not show much evidence of that. I want to ask them, “But do you love the Lord?” They will tell you they believe all the right doctrines, as though that saved them. They may be able to give the date when they “prayed the prayer”. But do they love the Lord? That’s the greatest commandment, not acceptance of a set of doctrines. Saving faith is not just believing a set of theological propositions; it’s the kind of wholehearted trust in and love for God that leads us to do what He said.
That may be the best way to test whether God has our heart: ask if there is anything He wants us to do that we are not doing. IV. The Test of Love John 14:21-24 Jesus said, John 14:21, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him. 23 If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. [24] He who does not love me will not obey my teaching.” Now this is challenging, to say the least. It takes our love for Jesus out of the “warm fuzzy” arena and puts it squarely on our obedience. We’ve already seen how God is not at all pleased with simply outward obedience without the heart, but now we see that what He really wants is obedience from the heart. This is a very objective test of our love for Christ: how much are we obeying Him? The constant danger for us is that we will come to church, go through the motions of worship, sing how much we love God, and then go out and continue to live the way we always have, indulging our self-centered sinful nature. The husband who is hooked on pornography, the wife who regularly gossips about her husband to her girlfriends, the compulsive overeater, the alcoholic, the one who has to have the latest gadget, who covets her friends’ clothes or house, etc. All these are signs that we have not really given our hearts to Jesus. We can tell ourselves that we love God, but the acid test of that love is obedience to His commands. Will you dare to ask God to show you where you are disobedient to Him? Will you pray, “Lord Jesus, I love you. I love you so much, I am willing to do whatever you say, and to stop doing whatever you tell me to. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. When I hear, I will obey, out of love for you”? Jesus says there are tremendous benefits for us when we obey like this: Verse 21 says He and the Father will love us, and He will show Himself to us. Verse 23 says the Father will love us and that the Father and Son will make their home with us. I heard Henry Blackaby the other day on a taped message say that the great tragedy of the American church is that we have become content without the manifest presence of God. What an indictment! Are you content without the manifest presence of God? Are you content to live your life without the day by day guidance of the Holy Spirit? Without the power of the Spirit changing your character and your reactions to life? Without regular, God-glorifying answers to your prayers? Without accomplishing anything that you could not possibly do without God? How can we be content to just go through religious motions, live a good life, stay out of trouble, and then die? Don’t you want God to use you to change the world, to advance His kingdom, to bring Him glory? Jesus says that when we love Him enough to obey Him, He will show Himself to us. Where are you not obeying Christ?
V. When We Fail Psalm 51:16-17 But what about when we fail? What should we do when we yield to that sinful nature still lingering in us, and do the things we do not want to do, or fail to do the things we know we should? Some people suddenly get real religious: their church attendance goes to perfect; they start giving more; they dust off their Bible and start reading it every day; they find time to pray—all for a while, until they stop feeling guilty. They do these things in an attempt to atone for their sin, to show God that they are sorry, to try to make up for it in some way. But that is not what God wants. King David messed up royally. He had sinned greatly with Bathsheba, and against her husband Uriah, by having him killed in battle so that David could have her as his wife. But when the prophet Nathan announced that he was guilty, David truly repented. He would have done anything to get right with God again. But he realized that what Isaiah would say later was true: God was not so much interested in the outward observances, as his heart. If all God wanted was a thousand bulls as burnt offerings, I’m sure David would have given them. But he knew that what God wanted was his heart. He wrote, Psalm 51:16-17 “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. [17] The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” We’re not talking here about a perfunctory, “I’m sorry, Lord.” That’s just words. That’s honoring God with our lips, as Isaiah said, without the heart. David knew God wanted his heart. This is the realization that will break us before God, and produce genuine, godly sorrow for our sin. It’s the realization that we have offended the One we love, that our sin is much more than just a violation of an impersonal law; it is a personal offense against the Lover of our souls. When we can feel how we have grieved His heart, then it will break our hearts, and that’s what God wants when we sin. Then we’ll know that there is nothing in the world we can do to make up for that, except to cry out to Him with a broken and contrite heart and beg for His forgiveness.
What goes on in our heart has very practical outworkings in our life. For example, we tend to think that there is a big difference between our heart—that inner spiritual, emotional, mental, personality core of who we are—and something as material and this-worldly as money. But Jesus tied them together. He said that money was a very spiritual thing. VI. The Heart and the Wallet Matthew 6:19-21; 2 Cor 4:18 Matthew 6:19-21, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. [20] But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. [21] For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Whatever you value, that will influence your life. You will think about it, long for it, pray about it, talk about it, day-dream about it, take action to get it, etc. In other words, you will set your heart on whatever is important to you. We often find this is true with our hobbies, for example. Bob Boerger, as we all know, is an avid fisherman, and he thinks about fishing a lot. Parents value their children highly, and they wind up talking about them to anyone who will listen. Occasionally you meet that lucky person who loves their job so much they eat, sleep, and breathe the job. The question is, what do we value the most? There are a lot of things in life that are worth valuing; they are important, like our jobs and our kids. Our hobbies can enrich our lives, and it’s not wrong to enjoy them. But what is your highest value? What do you treasure the most? That’s the thing that has your heart the most, and it needs to be God. Jesus points out that for many people, money can creep into first place in our lives if we are not careful. Either we have a lot of it, and spend an inordinate amount of time and emotional energy on how to manage and protect it, and on how to protect and maintain all the things we bought with it, or we don’t have nearly enough, so we spend all our time thinking about how to make ends meet and how we can get more money. In either case, we have set our hearts on that, rather than on the eternal values of the Kingdom of God. Paul pointed out that the things which are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal. So we should fix our eyes (i.e. set our hearts) on the unseen, but eternal values of life (2 Cor 4:18). Whatever we value, we will automatically spend our money on the things that are most important to us. Barbie and I have often wondered at people who we know don’t have nearly as much money as we do, but who have a really big flat screen television, or a boat, or some other expensive toys that we don’t feel like we can afford. But it’s just a question of values. They value those things enough that they are willing to spend money on them that we think could be better spent on other things. So Jesus points out that if we value the Kingdom of God the most, then we will automatically put our money there. If the unseen but eternal things are most important to us, we’ll invest in them; if the things of this world are most important to us, we’ll put our money into them. Because the reverse of what Jesus said is also true: Where our heart is, our treasure will be also. What do your spending patterns tell you about your heart? Do they show that you love God with all your heart, or do they reveal that you are in love with the world?
God wants your heart. Yes, He wants your service and obedience; yes, He wants your apology when you sin; yes, He wants your finances. But in all of that, He wants your heart. Take some time right now, and open your heart to Him. Be completely honest, and tell Him the state of your heart. If there is something that you love more than you love Him, confess that. If there is something that you love maybe as much as you love Him, confess that; He doesn’t want any close seconds. Ask Him to purify your heart so that you can love Him above everything else. |