Hearts of Clay

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So I'm really thrilled. I'm going to be delivering the message this afternoon. It is my first time doing it, as many of you know.

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Over the course of the last year, just as a shout out to the... Hopefully that doesn't break anything.

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As a shout out to the Institute courses, that's been one element of the discipleship that I've been able to enjoy while here over the last year, and it's been amazing.

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It's like Christian boot camp. So it's definitely something that's worth signing up for if you're interested in any of those subjects.

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But really, just over the course of the last year, just being discipled in this direction, I'm very glad that it's kind of like you're all here to watch me jump out of the nest for the first time and flap my wings.

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So yeah, it's good. But just so you know, too, I definitely approach this with a great deal of fear and trembling.

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It's a massive responsibility. God's Word is perfect, and it's life -changing. And my number one job in all of this is to get out of the way.

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So today, I'm going to be talking about hard -heartedness. Our fallen, fleshly condition means that our hearts are naturally trending towards shriveling up, to drying out, solidifying.

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We'll see examples of this at work in the Pharisees, in the crowds. And really, we'll see

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Christ, the living water, as the only way for a hardened heart to be made soft again.

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As a quick recap, again, to put this into its context, from last week, sort of the episode recap last week on Mark, Jesus was out in the fields with his disciples.

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They had the confrontation with the Pharisees over harvesting grain, grabbing the grains off the end of the wheat shafts.

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And the conflict that led to the, is man made for the Sabbath, or Sabbath made for man?

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So the Pharisees are currently furious because that didn't go well for them.

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And they're about to make another attempt to theologically trap the

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Son of God. So we'll see how that goes for them. Starting with the withered hand, here we will see the description of an injury or a disease that becomes, that I'll be, we'll be using as a symbol or analogy to carry forward.

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So again, he entered the synagogue, and a man was there with a withered hand. I was looking up, as I've been trained to do now, looking up meanings behind words and just trying to suss out more and more of like what the author's intent was.

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There were a lot of different actual meanings within shriveled, like shriveled, dry.

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A question for the kids who are here. Have you ever found a shriveled up dry worm on the sidewalk in the sun?

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Yeah. Okay. Multiple. Yeah. It's the season for that. Have you ever found, have you ever been eating grapes, and like most of the grapes are good, but you find one that's like shriveled up or dry?

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Have you eaten it? You have? Okay, you're braver than I am.

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Okay. Well, another, there's a Greek term for shriveled that translates as stiff, and then a

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Hebrew term that I particularly like. I won't attempt the pronunciation, but it translates as hard.

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And so hard in a way where you can't make an impression on it. So if you imagine like hard clay or hard snow, you know it's hard when you can't actually make a mark in it.

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You can't actually press into it. This may have meant for the shriveled hand that it just couldn't move.

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It might not have been shriveled up like a worm on the sidewalk, but it could have just been that the tendons were stiff, or there was just a hardness, or like the pose was shriveled.

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But regardless, possibly the idea that, yeah, stuck in place, which likely means that this man's whole life would have been affected by this wound or this disease.

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There's some Jewish commentary that I found that suggests that it would have likely stopped him from working. There's some thoughts that he was a carpenter or it was in some way related to the trades.

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This may have been an injury from that, but that's extra biblical commentary. But a person in this situation at this time and place would have been really dependent on family at best, and at worst likely living a life of begging.

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Also, keep in mind at this time that injury and disease was associated with sin.

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And so there's a good chance that some of his friends or family would be currently trying to avoid him so as not to be contaminated or influenced or mark that sin as well.

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But what's interesting to me, there's also some speculation around this man that some scholars think he was bait.

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We don't know, the Bible doesn't say, if he was an innocent and devout Jewish man who regularly attended this synagogue, or if he was an outsider that was bribed into attending this synagogue that day by the

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Pharisees, who saw this particular injury as an opportunity. Enter the Pharisees.

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And they watched Jesus to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so that they might accuse him.

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We're going to see their hard -heartedness at work. They basically embody hard -heartedness almost entirely.

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Now, we learned about the Pharisees last week, which was excellent, with the argument about harvesting grain on the

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Sabbath. In place of God, they had built an idol for themselves to worship called the

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Law. Now, my kids and I have been going through a study course, a foundations kind of early theology course, and we've been learning about worship.

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So if you picture a person as being in concentric circles, whatever is in the center circle is what you worship.

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And so, girls, Scarlett and Lucy in particular, the idea of what would happen, how would someone spend their time if in the very center circle they put the rules, and that was what they worshiped.

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How would they spend their time? What do you think? Yeah? In their house?

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Yeah. Especially in this time. Yeah. In the world. Scarlett? Stay in a corner?

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Yeah. Edge -proof the whole...

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Well, and probably try not to break any rules. How do you think they would treat friends? Strict?

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Kind and very, like... Not kind. Anxious. Anxious is a good word. Yeah. So, this idea that they have put rules at the very center of their life, the

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Law has become all -encompassing. With the withered hand, while having a huge impact on this guy's life, it wouldn't have been a life -or -death situation.

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This is not like a fatal injury. This is not something that's a majorly dangerous situation.

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But the Pharisees followed the rules, and one rule said, on the Sabbath, you are only allowed to cure someone if it's life -threatening.

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Now, kids, we talked about the Pharisees last week. On the

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Sabbath, you could only prevent injuries from getting worse, but curing was not allowed. Curing was work.

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So, can you imagine that on Sundays, if you were running around and playing, and you scraped your knees or you bonked yourself, your parents would be allowed to put a band -aid on, but they wouldn't be allowed to put any medicine on.

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They wouldn't be allowed to give you Tylenol if you had, like, a sore head or anything like that. Just keep it from getting worse.

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Some other Sabbath rules, just to indulge in this a little bit, I know Shane covered them, but they're so much...

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They're kind of fun to look at these Sabbath rules, because they get intense.

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And some of them are actually... Some of these rules are still followed today by Orthodox Jews. One I liked was, you can't carry anything further than four cubits.

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And a cubit, for those who don't know, is the distance from your elbow to the tip of the fingers. And there's a proportion rule where, you've probably heard, where your height is from the tip of your fingers to the tip of your fingers, spread out.

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So, that is your head to your toe. It's the exact same distance. Which means that if you fold it in, that's almost four cubits, basically, from elbow to elbow, to fingertip to fingertip.

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So, you're basically allowed to walk your height with... That's how far you can carry something.

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That also includes, today, for the people who follow these guidelines, that includes what's in your pockets.

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So, you can't put it in your pocket and get away with it. That still counts as carrying. That also includes going outside your house with food in your mouth.

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That counts as carrying as well. And the official load that you are allowed to bear is no more than a dried fig.

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So, just a dried fig. That's about it. There's also, I was reading, there's a specific rule where you can't cleverly cut more of it up into smaller pieces and carry those individual pieces.

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If you do that, then you're particularly breaking the law. There's severe consequences for that.

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So, you can't... It's some total dried fig. A lot of these rules, too, they kind of worked under categories.

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I was talking afterwards, after church last week, a little bit about this. But a lot of them were either related to like blanketed under farming or making clothes or that kind of thing.

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And so, one rule was that things cannot be attached or detached. So, you're not allowed to tear.

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You're not allowed to sew. You're not allowed to do anything like that. And today, this manifests, interestingly, it includes toilet paper.

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So, if you are really observing the Sabbath, this wouldn't have been the Pharisees back in the day. Obviously, toilet paper didn't exist.

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But for people who observe these rules today, you have to pre -tear a certain amount of toilet paper and leave it in a stack beside the toilet so that you aren't tempted to tear it.

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Of course, the rule is meant to be like don't make garments, don't work, don't do industry, but they follow the rules.

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Also, one more that I liked was you're not allowed to write two or more letters. Only two.

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And just letters, not words. And then erasing is the same. You're not allowed to get rid of or strike out more than two letters.

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I will say, okay, as funny as it is to point out some of these rules, especially on the more extreme edges,

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I do want to be a little sympathetic to the Pharisees. God gave them laws for their good.

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It's good to follow the law because the law was a gift. It was the Jewish identity in many ways.

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This was what separated Israel from all the other nations. With other gods, you were always guessing.

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You know, you sacrifice your child and you hope that the corn harvest that year is plentiful.

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But God gave clear guidelines. If you do X, I will do Y. This would have been at the time, especially for the

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Israelites in this time, a huge relief and the envy of the nations. Like when a parent gives you clear guidelines.

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So another question for the kids. How would you feel if around your house you didn't know what was allowed?

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You never knew what was allowed and what wasn't. And it changed it. Like one day you have your hands raised.

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I take it already you wouldn't like it. Is that right? Yeah. But imagine like, you know, you don't know if you can just go take an apple from the fridge.

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One day that might be totally fine. Another day that is like you're getting grounded. You were in big trouble. Or you don't know if you're allowed to watch half an hour of TV.

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An hour or no TV. And maybe it's fine. But then the next day, you're in big trouble.

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You're grounded. You're never going. Like it would just be intense. So I would assume, would you prefer it though to know the rules, to know what's allowed?

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Yes. Lots of nods. Okay. Yeah, exactly. I think that's how the Israelites felt too.

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But sadly, our flesh tends to desire safety above faith. You're following the law, and you're following all the rules, but what if you make a mistake?

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What if you're misinterpreting it? What about all the edge cases? There's always something around the edges.

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What about toilet paper? We're allowed to tear stuff, but like toilet paper, you have to tear it.

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It's perforated, but yeah. And so, once that happens, you add more guidelines.

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You add more rules, but what if those don't work? What if we're not following that? And your fear of breaking the law leads you to pile on more and more laws.

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It's not long before you've left behind love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

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That is long gone in the rearview mirror because of fear. So the withered hand has become a

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Pharisee's trap. If Jesus cures this hand on the Sabbath, he's violating

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Sabbath law. He will be curing a non -lethal ailment. Will Jesus fall for it, or did the

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Pharisees just fall into Jesus' trap? Yeah. So, Jesus' response, the

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Pharisees have made their play. Their trap is set. Now it's time for the God -man to respond. And he said to the man with the withered hand,

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Come here. And he said to the Pharisees, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?

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But they were silent. And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart.

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He said to the man, Stretch out your hand. He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.

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The withered, dry, twisted up, shriveled hand, hard and stiff, this stiff, dry, hard hand, was nothing compared to the hardness of the

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Pharisees' hearts. Jesus provokes the Pharisees with this theme, with the same theme that we saw last week.

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Man was not made for Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man. I know when I read the

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Bible, I used to read myself, historically, as I was reading it, I would read myself into the roles of the heroes,

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David's and Solomon's and all these great and amazing figures. It's easy for us to do.

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I find now I read myself more easily into the failures and the villains, and at best, the background characters standing off to the sidelines observing.

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And that seems to somehow read more truthfully. It's easy to read about the Pharisees and kind of chuckle and say,

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Ah, you goofballs, you totally missed it. But I also know my flesh better.

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If I'm not stretching out my hand and my heart to Jesus, I know that the hardening sets in immediately.

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It's so easy. I know it's easy for me. I thrive on routine. I don't know about you. I actually really enjoy just a regular, consistent pattern.

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And I have, I can be skeptical of, I'm very traditional, but it makes me skeptical of traditions.

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I just want to make sure if I'm following a tradition, there's a really good reason for it. But routines and traditions and even rules, they seem to work and they seem to benefit us.

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They seem to make improvements in life. If they work, they work. That's how they become ingrained.

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Follow this one rule and it'll all be okay. But that road gets drier and more shriveled and stiffer and harder.

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So the Pharisees went out and immediately held council with the Herodians against them how to destroy him.

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The Pharisees refused to stretch out their hearts. They had already gotten what they came for. They had evidence of Sabbath breaking.

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Multiple witnesses, they all saw it. They immediately marched their dry, shriveled selves over to the

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Herodians to plot Jesus's death. The fact that they went to the Herodians shows just how hard their hearts had become.

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So historical context, the Herodians, it's quite a club. They're an unofficial political group.

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They were loyal to Herod. Herod's rule, he was the Tetrarch, so it was basically like he was in charge of about four, there were four areas split up and he was in charge of one of them.

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Herod's rule was opposed by many. He was like the Jewish leader of this part of the world that had the authority of the

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Romans, the blessing of the Romans to rule over this group, over this territory. The Herodians, this group was a minority and they were basically the informants.

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They were the spies sneaking around in Jerusalem trying to help give Herod information so that he could plan his maneuvers.

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They were his eyes and ears. They were also Jewish Hellenists, so the idea behind that is that they wanted to blend

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Greek and Jewish culture. They wanted those two things. They were basically the progressives. They wanted to be like those hip, cool

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Greeks. They've got all these cool laws and all this sort of stuff. You've got all these stodgy rules. Let's go.

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But for the Jews, who identified, who their identity came from, the law, this was unthinkable.

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The Herodians were much less strict about following the law and, of course, as we've discussed, the

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Pharisees were all about following the rules. And for these reasons, the Pharisees very likely despised the

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Herodians. However, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Herod had just previously imprisoned

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John the Baptist on the suspicion that large crowds lead to uprisings. This was something that Herod was very, very aware of and he feared deeply.

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A populist revolt, a revolution. Remember this for later.

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This is Herod's great, great terror. The Pharisees knew that even though they despised the

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Herodians, they could use the power of the state to get Jesus executed. Couldn't do it themselves, but the state could.

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One of the things I like to do often is just pull back to a super high level to look and get context to this.

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This moment here with the Pharisees going to the Herodians is actually a really big deal and will kind of come into play in future talks as we expand on the narrative of Mark.

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So to go really high level, right from the beginning of the universe, even before the universe, according to John, all of creation had been preparing for Christ.

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You've likely heard the term spoken in this church many times, this redemptive history. You know, even just all through the

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Old Testament, it's bursting at the seams with genealogies, prophecies, foreshadowing, preparing for Christ and preparing for what he's about to do.

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So yeah, it's like the great clock of creation is ticking. And this is a big moment because here

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Jesus provokes the hard -hearted Pharisees and in doing so, this begins the preparations for the final act, which we will hear more about in the coming weeks.

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But we're going to, you know, the Pharisees will begin this plot and now this plot has begun. We're kind of on the water slide to Golgotha.

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But here we have a scene change. Now we're outside. The Pharisees are off plotting their plots, scheming their schemes.

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Scene change, we're outside the synagogue and a crowd is forming. It's easy to think when we read that, just modernize, just first,

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I admittedly, first time I read through it, my first impression was like, great, Jesus is getting popular. This is excellent.

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That would be an encouraging sign for a preacher to have a whole bunch of crowds coming. But unfortunately, yeah, we will see the effects here as well that hardened hearts can have.

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So Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea and a great crowd followed from Galilee and Judea, Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the

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Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. Tyre? Tyre? Tyre? Tyre sounds good.

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Tyre and Sidon. So yeah, here it says people came from all over Israel and a great crowd followed.

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This list of locations, this is one of the things that I really like about digging deeper into the Bible is that, you know, for the original readers, this would have just been, you would have understood some of what these regions were and what this description meant.

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But for us, it takes a little bit of comparison to really get the idea. And it can be hard to keep the place names straight if you're not regularly dealing with them.

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So I will compare it to Alberta. Even though the scale isn't perfect, Israel is actually quite a bit smaller, kind of fits into the center of Alberta, but they didn't have cars.

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So it should give us a general idea. Imagine Galilee is like northern

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Alberta, anything north of Edmonton. Judea and Idumea are central and southern

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Alberta. So Judea would be like, you know, Calgary to Lethbridge. And then Idumea would have been about Lethbridge down to the border.

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Beyond the Jordan is everything east of the QE2 to Saskatchewan. So from your side, it would be about that.

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And then Tyre and Sidon, these are cities that are in like the far, far north along the coast. And so when they heard this, it would be like the equivalent of an

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Albertan hearing people say, even people from Grand Prairie and high level came down to see

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Jesus. So it's like people came from way out there. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him.

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So Jesus had a reputation that had spread across all of Israel. And now all of Israel is coming to Jesus, or at least people from all of Israel.

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Imagine a preacher. I was trying to picture this, like imagining a preacher coming to Alberta that drew crowds from every corner of the province.

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As a side note, keep Herod in mind with this. Great crowds are coming. This is exactly his worst nightmare.

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This is, we're seeing this begin more and more and escalate. He will be highly motivated to help the

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Pharisees accomplish their twisted goals. And Jesus told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him.

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For he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. There are two

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Greek words used for the crowd. Again, this is just so neat. I love digging into this. The narrator uses pletho, which means to fill or to be full in the sense of like a liquid.

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But it is still used for the crowd quite often. It describes a, and I like this term, a bulging gridlocked throng.

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And it describes the crowd as filling the entire available space like a liquid.

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So it's like you're pouring people and they're filling up. There's so many, they just fill up every possible nook and cranny.

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The word Jesus uses for the crowd is oklos, which means like crowd in the mob sense or a rather dynamic multitude.

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And we still use this in, the root is in words like oklocracy, which is a word

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I've never used before, but it means mob rule or government by the wild populace. So in this circumstance, it's bad enough that Jesus has to tell his disciples to prepare a getaway boat.

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To avoid being crushed. Sadly, this clamor, this bulging gridlocked throng, this is not a response of faith.

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So if you've ever seen, I don't really like looking, I don't like seeing them, but at the same time, it's kind of a fascination with security camera footage from Black Friday sales.

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There's just something, you see them every year and it just almost seems like it gets worse and worse, but it's, you know, the mobs racing down the, the gates open up and the throng, it just pushes in like a, like water, like filling all available space.

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People just like pushing over displays, clamoring over each other. We're starting to rip boxes out of each other's hands and it's just, it's dark.

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It's people behaving like animals. This is not a faith response. Because really what this is at its core is fear.

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It's a fear of missing out. It's a fear of lack. It's a fear of there not being enough. A fear that if you, a fear that if you don't fight for what is yours, you're not going to have it.

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It's, it's that, it's that terror of lack. I'm, I will say the same fear is what fuels the modern day prosperity gospel.

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It's, it's that, that is out there. Some of you know our story, our family story. I won't go too into the background.

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You can ask us later. But I've seen this up close. Instead of seeking Christ, people seek what

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Christ can give. You know, you'll hear, with enough faith you'll get what you want.

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After all, God made you. He gave you your desires. So they couldn't possibly be evil.

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It's your God -given heart. What's wrong about that? And with that mindset, people start reading the

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Bible not as a window to Christ. I've seen this too as a shopping list of promises that you feel you're owed.

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I like to think of, if you've seen Finding Nemo, my favorite part of the Finding Nemo movie is the seagulls because they're just too, too perfect.

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Because, and this is, I think of, I think of the seagulls when I think of how that fear -driven prosperity gospel movement reads, reads the

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Bible. Joseph prospered in Egypt. I will too. Mine?

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You know, King Solomon was very, very wealthy. Mine? Elijah healed people. I want healing.

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Mine? Baby Jesus got gold as a gift. Mine? Judas got 30 pieces of silver.

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Mine? It gets bad fast. But back to Black Friday sales, people's fear of lack and the corrupt desires of their hearts lead them to act like animals.

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But if you imagine for a moment God's electronics store, it's a little crude, but it gets the point across.

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Take God's, in God's electronics store, on Black Friday, he has already set aside the right items for the right people.

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There's no need to run. It will be ready for you. It will be the best possible assortments of items.

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It will be not even the ones that you thought you wanted. It will be the ones that you just like, you never would even guess, but you'd be so glad that it's that instead of your lame ideas.

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And the price will not be more than you can bear. If you knew that, if you knew that it was waiting for you, you knew that God had you in mind, that he was prepared, there would be no crush, there would be no push, there would be no mob.

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That's what a faithful response would look like, and that is definitely not how this crowd is acting with Jesus.

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They want, and it's not bad to want healing. I mean, everyone who suffers with a disease or an affliction wants to be healed, but their hearts are hard, and so they press and they crush to get what they want.

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Just like the Pharisees put the law above God and above others, the crowd is putting their physical need above God and above others.

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This brings us to the demons. We've seen hard -heartedness in action a couple times now.

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Now we'll see a kind, I've got to be careful with it, a kind of softness of heart, but from an embarrassing place.

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It says, and whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, you are the son of God, and he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

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So more context here, which I found cool. Roman Gentiles, who the author was originally writing to, they would have been totally familiar with the idea of unclean spirits or demons, like perfectly normal.

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They had a pantheistic system which made room for gods that were good and bad and neutral, and sometimes they interchanged and they moved around, but it also made plenty of room for the lower -level spiritual beings, and so, yeah, this was normal.

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And if anything, it actually would have acted as more of an endorsement of Christ. It would have been significant because it's basically an extra layer of validation from the spiritual dimension.

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It's like, cool, yeah, we've heard humans saying this, there's eyewitness accounts, there's healings, but also representatives from the other side.

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They might be unclean and horrible and you wouldn't want to encounter them, but he checks out according to them, so that's great. And one thing that I found that was really neat, this is, again,

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I'm having way too much fun with this Greek, just the Greek and the Hebrew stuff. The word used when it says that the demons, that they cried out, is a

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Greek word called, the Greek word kraso, and kraso means to croak in the sense of to produce the sound of a crow or a raven.

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And it's thought to be onomatopoeic, so it's like, it's kind of the word imitating the sound. So it's basically like the equivalent of our word, like, caw.

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You know, to us it sounds, and animal sounds in different languages are always fascinating to hear because a person's original language kind of almost changes how you hear it and how you reproduce it.

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So in this sense, like, when they hear a crow or a raven cawing, it's like, kraso.

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I don't know where the zo comes from, that's not really, but, you know, it's kraso. I like it partly because it's this little bit of flavor when it comes to encountering the demon possessed, which is a really, it's a creepy situation and it's not something anyone would desire, but just this idea that it's not just that they're like, you are the son of God, but it's like, just imagine a crow shouting, you are the son of God.

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Like, I won't even try to do it, I'll wreck my voice, but you can imagine that. So we have this huge crowd from all across Israel that has become a crushing mob, filling up all the available space, and as a side note, these are

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Jewish people. These are biblically literate Jewish people who have been waiting for the Messiah, and it's the demon possessed that confess that Jesus is the son of God and bow down to him.

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The demons may be as broken as a creature can possibly be, but even they can pipto, which means to fall upon someone's face in humility or submission.

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Their hearts are corrupted, but they know how to properly respond to Jesus. As I mentioned earlier, one word for Hebrew, sorry, one word for shriveled related to hardness in the

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Hebrew, sorry, one word in Hebrew for shriveled related to hardness, which means you couldn't make an impression or a mark on it.

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By Jesus' time in the year zero, this time in the Roman Empire, paper was totally common.

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It was very, very, you'd find it everywhere, so it's commonly in use, but there was still an old practice of writing on clay tablets, and I learned about this back in art history and I found it endlessly fascinating.

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Your paper would be just a sheet of clay, and then you'd use a wood tool or stylus that had like a flat end on one side and a pointy end on the other, and you'd kind of press into it, and that would just be how you'd write is pressing into this clay, and there are tons of archaeological examples of this, and it's every kind of subject matter.

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It's really cool. It's like there's stories, myths, essays, hymns, business records, and one of my favorite is shopping lists.

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There's one in particular that's this really cool little specimen. It's only about like that big, like an old Nokia phone for the old folks, and it's like it's a shopping list of boots, so it's like get this many yellow boots, 17 of this kind of boots, so it's either a boot seller or someone who had a household big enough that like I need about 67 pairs of boots, but yeah, it's just listed, and it's ancient, and we have it today.

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It's in a museum. There's your grocery shopping or your day at the market.

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People also would have another kind of cool artifact which is cylindrical seals. It's very similar to like a signet ring, so if you've ever seen like a ring with a carving or an engraving on it, you press it into wax to seal a letter.

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It was a lot like that idea. This was kind of like a unique item that only you own so you could mark something so that you knew that it belonged to or that it came with the authority of this person, and the form that it would take was like depending, they come in all sorts of sizes, but the idea was like it's just a little stone cylinder, and it has a relief image carved in the negative on it, and so like a little rolling pin, you could press it down onto the clay and roll it, and it would create this kind of bass relief kind of, it would look like a little carving on your tablet, and again, tons of really cool examples of it, but that would mean, again, there's your distinct mark.

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As a side note, it's kind of cool. No one really uses this today, but you can still get, you know, on fancy cooking, the really baking specialty sites, rolling pins that have patterns carved into them so when you roll out, like the cookies have little flower prints and all that kind of stuff.

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Same idea. So the clay would eventually harden. When it did, obviously you could no longer write on it.

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You could no longer roll your seal or press your image onto it, and like I said before, your shopping list could now last for millennia, and as the clay dries eventually, the more pressure you applied, the harder you press your tool, your seal, or whatever, clay would simply shatter, so the question would be, how soft is the clay of our hearts?

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Is the clay of our hearts soft enough that Christ can press his seal, roll his image onto it, or is it hardened, resisting his imprint?

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The man with the shriveled hand reached out to Christ, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees had hearts like rocks.

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The law had made their imprint already. It was done. They would bear no further marks. They had found another master.

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If anything, as we saw, Jesus pressing on them shattered them, and in their brokenness, they turned to some of their worst enemies to help them commit murder by state.

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The crowds, responding out of fleshly desire, born out of fear, we can see that the clay of their hearts was marked with their own seals, their own desires, their own fears, and because of that, they missed

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Jesus. Only the demons knew enough to basically worship him. While crowds of biblically literate

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Jews crushed and pressed and mobbed, the demons bowed down in humility and submission and cried out,

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You are the Son of God. But there's good news. He's the potter and the living water.

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One thing I learned in doing this research, it was kind of cool, because I didn't even know this, and I actually know people.

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Back when I went to art school, I had friends who went through the whole clay department. That was their thing. They made pottery, but I had never actually heard about this process.

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There's a process called slaking, and the idea there is that a potter or someone who works with clay takes a bunch of their clay that's dried or a failed pot or maybe a clay tablet or whatever else like that, and they let it sit out to dry on purpose, and they let it get as dry as they possibly can.

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Then they smash it to pieces and put all those pieces in a bucket, and then into that bucket, they cover the clay entirely with water, and after enough time has passed, what emerges from that water is fresh, usable, soft clay.

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Sometimes a metaphor is too good. If you are not a believer,

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I urge you to put your shriveled, desiccated, dried -up, worm -on -the -sidewalk heart in his hands.

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Repent of your sins. Turn away from them and turn to the good potter. Let him shatter the dried -up clay of your old self so that he can put you in his bucket and submerge you in the water of life that comes from Christ.

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Believe in him and obey him with the new, soft heart that he gives you. Just like I'm sure the man with the shriveled hand felt incredible relief being able to open and move his hand around, how much more relief will you feel when your heart, when your life, is restored?

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If you are a believer, now and continuously, stretch out your hand to Christ. Continue to pray, to read the word, to worship.

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When potters are working on a pot, or if people were working with clay tablets, to keep them workable, they will continually sponge them down with water.

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We can be so thankful that we've been saved, but until we pass on from this world, our inherited nature will trend towards hardness.

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You might think you don't have a hard heart, but the heart is sick. Just the drying effects, the shriveling effects that fear and pride and lust and envy lies, even just the small little moments where we're not loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.

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We're not loving God with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls. These things tend to dry us out.

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So be vigilant. Daily submit to the water of life sponge bath so that the clay of your hearts can remain soft.

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I will end on a Spurgeon quote, because I was trained by Shane.

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And so this is what we have. And forgive me, but I added a little note here.

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It's like I'm going to splurge on Spurgeon, but it's just so appropriate.

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Spurgeon was saying, coming back to the matter of the possession of a heart, which I mentioned earlier, I asked the young girl who recently joined the church, have you a good heart?

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She replied, yes, sir. Have you thought over that question I asked in return? Don't you have an evil heart?

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Oh, yes. She returned. She answered. I said, how do your two answers agree?

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Well, I know I have a good heart because God has given me a new heart and a right spirit.

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I also know I have an evil heart for I often find it fighting against my new heart. So lastly,

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Jesus said to the man, stretch out your hand. And the man stretched it out and his hand was restored.