The Heart of True Holiness

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 we're in the Gospel of Mark after an extended break. By my count,

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I went back and did the math. We were away from this Gospel for two months or just shy of two months.

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And so that was the last time we touched this book in our study. I think it's wise before we begin, because it's been so long, so much time has elapsed, that we do a brief survey through the

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Gospel of Mark, just to remind ourselves of where we are in this text of Scripture. So if you remember, all the way back to early

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May, when we first opened this Gospel, we began to study this book and we found that this

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Gospel bears Mark's name. We sometimes see him called John Mark in our

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New Testaments, because it was likely written by him sometime in the mid -AD 50s.

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And if we know anything about Mark, you'll remember that he accompanied Paul and Barnabas on a missionary journey.

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We read about that in Acts chapter 13, and he quickly deserted them. And after there was a sharp divide between Paul and Barnabas, we don't know exactly where this

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John Mark or Mark went, except that he found himself at some point under the discipleship of the

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Apostle Peter. We find that in extra -biblical evidence, and we also find that right in the Scriptures.

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It was in 1 Peter 5 .13 that, as Peter is finishing off that first letter, he calls

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John this affectionate term, he says, my son. And so from the biblical and extra -biblical evidence, we know that it was likely

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Mark under the influence of Peter that wrote this Gospel. It was likely the first Gospel that was written.

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And as we learned already in the study, Mark is a fast -paced Gospel. So if you weren't here when we started, or if you weren't here even a couple of months ago,

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Mark is a fast -paced Gospel that concerns itself more with the powerful working of Christ than with the specific words of Christ.

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And so the whole point of this Gospel is essentially two -fold.

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Mark's principal goals are these. Firstly, he wants to instill in the mind of the reader a sky -high and an exalted

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Christology. That is, that Mark goes to great lengths to magnify

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Christ as he focuses on Christ's miraculous work, so that the reader would read and understand that Jesus is both fully man and also fully

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God. And that he possesses divine authority over and above all of his creation, whether it be power over disease and death, power over wind and waves, authority over storms and seas, or even the ability that God alone has to forgive sins.

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So firstly, Mark wants to give us a high Christology. And then secondly, Mark goes to great lengths to lay out the terms of discipleship under the

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Lord Jesus. Mark demonstrates to us that there is a cost to following Christ.

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And if we go right back to the first chapter of Mark, we see that Mark devotes significant space to the calling of his disciples.

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Early on we learn that to follow Christ is to joyfully exchange all of our life's ambitions for all that is in accord with his will and with his agenda.

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It is to leave your former life behind. Whether you're the heir of an affluent fishing tycoon like John and James, the son of Zebedee, or if you're a lowly, shameful, despised tax collector like Matthew, it's to drop your nets, it's to rise from your tax booth, to count all things as loss and immediately follow after Christ.

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So chapters 1 through 7, that's exactly what we find, is Mark making these cases.

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Jesus Christ, in Mark's own words, in chapter 1 and verse 1, is Jesus Christ, the

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Son of God. And if we trace our way through, just if you follow along even with me, turn to chapter 1, we find

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Christ attesting to his divine deity by healing many, calling many of his own choosing to himself.

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If we look to chapter 2, we find that Christ heals a paralytic, that he pardons sins, that he declares himself

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Lord of the Sabbath. In chapter 3, he draws crowds.

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In chapter 4, we find him teaching. Chapter 5, he sends demons into a herd of pigs.

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Chapter 6, he's feeding thousands, he's walking on water. And then in chapter 7, where we were two months ago, we find him confronting the religious leaders.

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And that last point, that last occurrence, is where we find ourselves today in that context.

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In chapter 7, Jesus can be found confronting the scribes and Pharisees and annihilating their fixation with man -made, legalistic rules.

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And this week, what we're going to find as we continue this study, really it's part two of what

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Steve preached so long ago, is that these religious leaders, again, have completely misunderstood what it means to be pure and holy.

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And if I could just ask you for a second, is that not true of the world in which we live today?

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That many misunderstand what it means to be holy, to be righteous before God.

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There are so many ideas in the world of what it takes to be a man who is like his

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God, who is pure and undefiled. And that was the case for the scribes and Pharisees.

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They did not understand the true source of sin and defilement. They believed that impurity came from outside of the man.

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We talked about illness this afternoon, almost like a contagious illness that's in the environment and that wreaks havoc on the individual.

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But this is not the case. And what we're going to find as we study, as we get back into this gospel, it is a sweet passage in one sense and it is a challenging passage in another sense because Christ is going to show us that we do not have the hardware for righteousness in and of ourselves.

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Here, Christ is going to teach the Pharisees. He's going to teach the disciples. He's going to teach us. This is the big theme, that defilement is not something outside of us that can be avoided through rituals or religious activities or even the most extreme forms of discipline and asceticism and harshness on the body.

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But issues of sin and defilement are in fact hard issues.

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You and I, all of humanity's greatest hindrance to holiness, is not out in the world.

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It's not on the internet. It's not on TV. It's not amongst the politicians. It's not anywhere except in our own hearts.

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And what we need to be free from defilement, to truly be holy at heart, to be pleasing to God, is to have an altogether new heart.

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A new heart that only Christ can give. And so, we're going to dive into this.

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Just so you know the layout of the land so you can anticipate it, I have the insert in the bulletin.

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The first heading, that first point that I call the heart of the problem. We're going to do our heavy lifting.

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I know sometimes we do this and we don't do this. We're going to do our heavy lifting in that first heading.

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We're going to do a full exposition, full exegesis of the passage there. That is, making observations and then seeking to rightly interpret the passage.

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And then the second and third heading in your bulletin. The second and third point are going to be looking specifically at points of interpretation and application.

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So the structure, I know that I tend to structure things the same a lot of times. The structure is a little bit different.

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So just follow along with me. So the first thing that I want us to consider as we open the text and read it together is this.

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The heart of the problem. What is the heart of our holiness problem?

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And we're going to begin by reading verses 14 and 15. Mark starts with these words. He says, And he called the people to him, this is

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Christ, and said to them, Hear me, all of you, and understand. There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defiles him.

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Mark begins by telling us that Jesus called the people to himself.

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And if we look at the literary context, the geographical context in which this is taking place, it's likely that this was the same mixed group of scribes and Pharisees and onlookers and disciples that we find earlier in chapter 7.

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Earlier in that chapter we find that he corrected the Pharisees on their views of ritual washing, seeking to be undefiled by washing their hands, or in other cases, washing dishes and other things.

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And then their placing of the oral tradition, man -made rules over and above God's word.

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And so he begins this section after that interaction with a sobering invitation for people to come and to pay attention.

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It's almost as if perhaps you're sitting on an airplane and the airplane shifts and the captain says, we have an important announcement.

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This is something that Christ wants the listeners to pay attention to. And he uses a

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Greek word, or Mark uses a Greek word to translate him. It's the Greek word proskalaomai.

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It's a word that Mark uses only nine times in his gospel. And what it's meant to be is this.

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It is something that is to catch the reader's attention. It is a solemn declaration.

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There is an important announcement that's about to be made. And so we too, dear saints, as we sit in these chairs with our

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Bibles in our laps, should pay attention. And so with his listeners' attention, Jesus says this.

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He says that it is not what goes into a man. It is not what is outside of a man that defiles him, but is what comes out of him that makes him impure.

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This was no doubt in response to his previous interaction with these

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Pharisees who were obsessed with washing hands, of exacting rinsing of bowls and cups and all manner of items.

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And as we've heard already before, what Christ is doing is he's getting at the heart of the

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Pharisees' issues. And he's getting really, if we look carefully, at the heart of man's issue in general.

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Now to speak about the Pharisees specifically, the Pharisees were unrelenting in their pursuit of ritual purity.

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I love studying the Pharisees on this topic because it is largely outrageous. If it weren't sad, it would be humorous.

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Just to see to the lengths that the Pharisees went in order to keep themselves pure.

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You see, they viewed themselves as pure blank slates. And they went to great lengths to keep themselves from being tarnished by the defilements of the world.

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So they sought to keep a variety of laws, of the law of God and of man -made laws, to keep themselves pure and to keep impure things out of them.

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And so when it came to things like dietary laws, the Pharisees not only restrained themselves or refrained from eating pork or certain seafoods or other clean food items under the

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Old Covenant law, but they added laws upon laws upon laws to stay as far away from impurity as possible.

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And if we were to look at some of those laws and some of the other rabbinical dietary laws, it reveals this pattern of seeing themselves, as people often do, as seeing themselves as innately good, a full of untapped potential, and of all of the evil and all of the defilement outside of themselves.

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And kids, maybe you'd appreciate some of these things. But a couple of the rules that these rabbinical dietary laws insisted on was this, that if you were to have one clean fish and another fish or item of seafood that was unclean, it was not allowed to put them perhaps on the same plate, to store them in the same place, to have them touch.

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But the rabbinical laws allow that if you were to take one unclean fish and one clean fish, put them in a jar together and pickle them together, and they sat there in their own juices for months or even several years, at the end of that you could pluck the clean fish out, and it was okay to eat.

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They forbid adults from drinking human breast milk, at least from the source.

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But if it was to be put in a bowl or a dish or a special cup, then it could be consumed.

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Their cash root or kosher dietary laws stipulated, and even still stipulate today, that if a

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Jew were to eat grapes, it had to be grapes planted and farmed by a

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Jewish farmer. It was forbidden to eat grapes, and still is forbidden to eat grapes from a

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Gentile farmer. Or really interestingly, if you're like me and you like hot food, and so you prepare spicy hot wings.

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Now I'm lactose intolerant, I can't do this, but maybe the ordinary person would pour themselves a tall glass of milk.

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That would be against Jewish law. Now why is that? Because there is a law against cooking a young goat in its mother's milk.

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And because chicken is kind of like goat, it cannot be consumed with milk.

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Now I'm not sure if anyone ever told the Pharisees that chickens don't produce milk, but those were the laws that they followed.

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And all of these rules focused on the external act of outward obedience, with no thought given to obedience at the heart level.

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And a perfect example of this is one such Pharisaical tradition that became known as the laws of intention.

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So because they stacked laws upon laws upon laws, it became so difficult to keep all of these laws that they invented this thing called the laws of intention.

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And what it was, was this. The Jew could wake up in the morning and say, I intend to keep all of the laws.

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And then they could forego keeping any of the laws, because it was their intention to keep the law.

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And so what it created was a system and a group of people where their mouths were near, but their hearts were far from God.

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And here, as Jesus teaches this, what he's getting at is something that is altogether different from this system.

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Here he tells this parable to convey that defilement doesn't come from the outside, but it already exists on the inside.

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And this was, in fact, such a radically countercultural teaching. I don't know if you noticed this, but Jesus teaches this parable.

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And then when he gets privately and alone with the disciples, they have to ask again what it means, because not even they can compute what it is that he's getting at.

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That righteousness is cut, or from unrighteousness and defilement comes from within, rather than from without.

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So in verse 17, when Christ is alone with his disciples, they ask him the meaning of this.

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And in verse 18, this is what we read. And they said to him, and he said to them, excuse me, then are you also without understanding?

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This is a rebuke. Do you see that whatever goes into a person from the outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart, but his stomach, and is expelled?

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Thus he declared all foods clean. And he said, what comes out of a person, what comes out of a person, is what defiles him.

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So contrary to popular Jewish thought, popular Jewish theology, Jesus teaches that it's not just clean food items that don't defile a person, but in God's economy, and especially under the new covenant that Jesus Christ is about to usher in, even unclean food items will no longer defile a man.

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At the end of the day, everything passes through the stomach and is eliminated and has no effect on the ultimate source of defilement, namely the human heart.

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And at the end of verse 19, for those of you that like a nice slab of bacon in the morning with your breakfast, or who'd like to go out to Red Lobster on your birthday or something like that,

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Mark makes this wonderful parenthetical commentary, this little note for all of us to read and to take heed to.

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He says this, he says, thus he declared all foods clean. Just as Peter would learn again in Acts chapter 10, maybe that's why this came into place with Peter's input,

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Peter's words in Mark's ear. In Acts chapter 10, we saw that God said to Peter, what

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God has made clean, we do not call unclean or common. And so here,

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Christ gets down to the heart of true holiness. Impurity and defilement do not come.

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I know that I've already said this several times, and I still do not think that you fully believe me.

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Impurity and defilement do not come from our environments. They're not something on the outside that infect our souls.

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What defiles a person is what comes out of our hearts. We need to stop here just for a moment.

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When Mark uses, when Christ uses this word heart, the biblical authors, most of us today, when we think of the word heart, we think of the center of feelings and of emotions, of the seat of love and romance.

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Kids, you might appreciate this, that for the biblical authors, for the Jews in that day, they didn't speak of the heart as being the center of emotions.

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You know what they spoke of as being the center of emotions? Of the bowels.

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And so imagine making your Valentine's Day a card with a nice picture of the bowels on the front of the card.

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What we're talking about here is not the center of love and emotion, but the seat of the will.

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We read about it in Genesis, the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

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It's the control center of the man that processes thoughts and conscience and motives and desires, what some people might today call the mind.

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And this is the problem for every human being that has ever been born.

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Not that we have sinful influences around us, certainly that is true, but that the greatest sinful influence in our lives is not without, but within.

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It is in our control centers. And we discover what is in our hearts when we speak.

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If we look at the parallel passage that Matthew documents in Matthew 15, 11, he says this, he quotes

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Christ as saying, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth.

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This defiles a person. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

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The tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of all that is in our hearts. And so when a person gossips, when a person slanders their neighbor, when they curse

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God, he reveals in that instance the true content of his heart.

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And likewise, when an individual gives thanks and speaks words of encouragement and edification and praises

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God throughout his day, he reveals the condition of his heart. Now, there's so much more to get at, but I'm just going to ask you for a moment, if you consider what it is that comes out of your mouth on a daily basis, what is the condition of your heart today?

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Is it blessing or is it cursing? Is it edifying or is it coarse jesting?

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What is the condition of your heart? All of our behavior, dear brothers and sisters, whether good or bad, is not a behavior problem.

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Now, if you were raised in a non -Christian home like mine, or if you were raised in a home maybe where they didn't have a sound theology of the heart, there are probably many times that you were taught that your behavior is a behavioral issue.

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When you're at grandma's and you're goofing off and your mom says, Behave! Or maybe when you go to school, you've been having a bad time at school and your parents say to you,

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Do not misbehave at school today. But what we find from Scripture is this, that our problem is not a behavioral problem.

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It is a heart problem. Out of the abundance of our actions, out of the abundance of our words, we see the very meditations of our hearts.

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And then Christ makes this plain in verses 20 -23. We're almost through the exegesis part here.

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Stay with me. And he said, What comes out of a person, that is what defiles him.

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For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.

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All these evil things come from within and they defile a person.

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What's really interesting, we don't see it in our English translations, but if we were to go back to the original languages for a moment, what we see here is a list of 12 sinful attitudes or actions.

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The first six, if we were to go back to the original language, appear in the plural.

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And that's really important because what it conveys to us is that those are sinful actions. If we look at those first six, assuming we don't count evil thoughts, that is.

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Out of the heart of a man come evil thoughts, and here they are. Sexual immoralities, that's the

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Greek word pornea, a word that's used broadly for sexual immoral behavior like adultery, fornication, homosexuality, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetousness, covetings, and then wickedness, this blanket term that accumulates, that collects all the sinful actions that could be listed.

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And then for the remaining six in that list, this appears in the singular, and what that tells us is that these are sinful attitudes.

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So deceit, are you a liar? Are you a hedonist? Are you envious? Are you slanderous?

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Are you prideful? Are you foolish? All of these,

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Christ says, come from within. Come from within the heart and defile a person.

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And I love, I just love, I love commentators that are able to wordsmith and create pictures, and H .A.

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Ironside, in his commentary, he says this, he says, the heart itself is like a nest of unclean birds.

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Picture that for a second, a nest full of unclean birds ready to leave the nest and go out into the world.

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And he says this, what a list. Who can say these things have never had any place whatsoever in our hearts, in his heart.

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Every man is capable of falling into every sin here mentioned.

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And what we see, we're not going to go into it in depth, is that this applies broadly to all of humanity.

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Genesis 6 -5 tells us, before the flood, that every intention of the thoughts of man's heart was only continually evil.

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Now some might say, surely that was erased by the flood. It wasn't, because in Jeremiah 17, in verse 9, we read, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.

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Who can understand it? And so, this is the heart problem of every person in the world.

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That we cannot be righteous, even of ourselves, because we have all the wrong hardware.

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We have nothing to accomplish the job of being holy before a holy and righteous

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God who demands holiness of his people. Now this is really interesting.

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Unlike so many passages in the Gospels, this text ends right here.

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Christ gives all law, and no gospel in this text. It's as if,

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I remember hearing a story, I believe it was Paul Washer that preached it, he was getting fitted with his first suit, and there was a man in the tailor's shop that said, hey brother, or hey man, you're becoming a preacher, aren't you?

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And he said, yes I am. And he said, we used to stand on that street corner, and we would preach law for weeks, until they would beg us for the gospel.

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Now, I'm not sure, I'm not commending that to you, but here Christ is leaving the disciples, and the

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Pharisees, and the people, and even us, even you, at this point where it's all law, and no gospel.

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Our sin problem is radical and pervasive, and affects every faculty, and every aspect of our existence.

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And so it begs the question, brother and sister, how can anyone be holy if this is the case?

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How can we sit here today with any amount of hope?

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Is there any escape, children, from this fallen and defective heart that you have been born with?

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I want us to dwell for a moment in this tension. Dear friends, this is what man deserves, to be told that he has a sinful heart, that he has only ever continuously been evil, that there is nothing under the sun that man can do to be right with God.

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All that we need, we do not have. And all that we have, God would rather not see or need.

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Our lives are characterized by sinful actions. We have offended an infinitely holy God, and we deserve, mark my words, death and an eternity in hell for sinning against an eternally and infinitely holy

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God. And we ought to have no hope, period. Now if Christ did not come to the world, that would be the end of this sermon, that you are unrighteous, you are not holy, you have fallen short, and to hell you will go.

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Now if you were an astute listener in the time of Christ, and you had a mind, now you're going to forgive me, but I'm going to go beyond the text, but I trust that you'll see that I'm leaning on the text.

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If you were an astute listener, you might say to yourself, and you had a mind, a knowledge of Old Testament prophecy, you might say, but wait, was there not a prophet somewhere in the canon of Scripture that talked about a new heart, a different heart, a heart that will give me hope in this world?

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If you have the headings, I want to talk to you now about the promise of a new heart. It's not in our passage, but I believe

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I'm being faithful because this passage anticipates what Christ is to do in the future.

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And I'm just, I'm not going to preach law today and leave gospel for next week.

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If we were to go back and find that astute reader and turn back in the pages of our

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Old Testament and turn to Ezekiel 36, 26, amongst other passages, what we would find is this, that the prophet

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Ezekiel, hundreds of years children before Christ, he talked that not only would

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God make a new covenant with new laws, but that he would give God's people new hardware and the best news in all the world, not only new law, but a new heart.

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Ezekiel 36, 26 says this, and I will give you a new heart.

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Oh, in light of what we just read, is this not the most glorious line already?

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And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit, and a new spirit

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I will put in you. And dear brothers and sisters, I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

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God made a promise. He knew before the foundations of the world that we would not have the heart that we needed.

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And so he promised a new heart. But dear brothers and sisters, a new heart alone is not going to make us right with God.

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In order to bring about that new covenant, there needed to be the shedding of blood to inaugurate this new covenant.

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And so while we were still dead in our trespasses and sins, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, when we all were children of wrath, without hope and without God in the world,

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Christ came. He went to the cross. He became accursed on our behalf.

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He poured out his blood on that tree that he might bring about a new covenant and give his people a new heart.

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In John chapter 7, in verse 38, it says, whoever believes in me, this is Christ speaking,

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John 7, 38, as Scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

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He says this is in reference to the Holy Spirit, that he's going to give us a new heart, and not just an ordinary, plain heart, but a heart filled with his spirit.

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In Acts 15, 9, it says, and he made no distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts by faith.

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So the Christian, brother and sister, without going into it in every single detail today, has a new heart.

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And it is not a heart, like we would read in Jeremiah 17, 9, if someone says that applies to the

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Christian's heart, I would say no. It is not a heart that is deceitful and desperately sick, but he's given us a new heart, albeit an unsanctified heart.

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And what God has given us, what Christ has given us in this new heart that was promised from hundreds of years before Christ and planned by God from eternity past, is that he has given us now all that we need, not only for life and for godliness, but to look to his son by faith, to perceive his son supernaturally by the powerful working of his spirit.

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Dear brother and sister, if you're a Christian in this room, you have a new heart in Christ. You have new hardware to trust in Jesus Christ eternally for your forgiveness, to look to him, to love him, to obey him, albeit imperfectly.

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I recently came across a story I think that illustrates this perfectly. In 1903, there was an evangelist.

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I'm not sure why all the evangelists in the early 1900s were in Chicago, but he was in Chicago and he was conducting evangelistic meetings, preaching the gospel to crowds of people who had come.

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And after one night he had preached the gospel, a man came to him and on that particular night, it's worth saying this

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Booth Tucker was his name. Tucker had preached on the sympathy and the compassionate heart of Christ, that Christ is compassionate and sympathetic and that he loves us and that he is with us and that he walks with us and that he helps us.

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And this man came to him and said, he confronted Tucker, and with great vehemence he said, you can talk like that, how

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Christ is dear to you and how he helps you, but I assure you, if your wife was dead, as my wife is dead, and if you had your babies crying for their mother who would never come back, you could not say the things that you are saying about Christ, that Christ is compassionate, that he has a heart for his people.

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Now, as God's wise providence would have it, just a few days later,

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Booth Tucker's wife was traveling on a train, there was a big wreck and she died on that train and her body was brought to Chicago for the funeral and at the close of the funeral service,

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Tucker Booth stood at the front of the room, he looked down at the body of his wife and he said, the other day

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I was here and a man came to me and said that I could not say that Christ is sufficient, that if my wife were dead and my children were crying for their mother, that he would not be enough and he looked out into the vast crowd and he said, if that man is here,

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I tell you, after the death of my wife, that Christ is sufficient and why is that?

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He says, my heart is all crushed, my heart is all bleeding, my heart is all broken, but there is a song in my heart and Christ has put it there and if that man is here,

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I tell you that though my wife is gone and my children are motherless, Christ speaks comfort to me today.

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Tucker's life was turned upside down but by God's grace, at the time of his conversion,

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Christ had given him a new heart, a heart that was flowing to overflowing, filled to overflowing with the

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Holy Spirit, a heart that was not cold, stone cold, but a heart of flesh that could love

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Christ and trust Christ in the most difficult of circumstances, a heart that could receive all of the comforts of Christ and with that aching heart, in this hour of unspeakable pain, he stood at the front of this room and he extolled the

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Lord of his heart, the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, as it happened, because God is sovereign, that man was sitting in one of the chairs in that funeral and he got up, he saw in an instant his own unregenerate heart, that he had no ability to understand how a man could endure such trials and still have a sweet song of comfort in his heart and that man stood up and he walked down the aisle, he reached the front, he fell beside the casket at the front of the room and he cried, if Christ can help me like that,

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I surrender to him. That is just one picture of what it means to have a new heart in Christ, a heart that loves

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God and trusts God and looks to him for hope. Now, brothers and sisters, what do we do with this new heart?

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If Christ has given you a new heart, do you treat it the way that I often treat my shoes?

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I think about this often, that I get a pair of shoes, I confess, and I have wide feet and I blow, the first thing

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I do is I blow my feet out of the sides of my shoes and they last about six months and I throw them into the garbage.

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Do you treat your heart the way that I treat my shoes? As if it were disposable. Just recently

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I went to a store and I bought myself a nice pair of hunting boots and for the first time ever in my life,

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I looked at the care instructions and I bought what I needed to take care of my shoes.

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Now, have you ever looked at scripture? All that scripture has to say about caring for your heart, of guarding the new heart that God, that Christ has given you.

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This is what it means now to guard our new hearts. We have a mandate to cultivate our hearts.

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In Proverbs 4 .23, it says this, keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flow springs of life.

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If you're a Christian and you have a heart that Christ has given you, you are now commanded to keep it.

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Now, I'm not talking about keeping yourself saved. Don't confuse me. But of nourishing and caring for this heart.

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In Proverbs 4 .23, where the writer says keep your heart with all vigilance, he uses a military term.

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The NIV, if you have that, translates it guard. It means to keep watch or to protect. It recalls imagery of a watchman who stands at his post at the city wall with an enemy army besieging the city.

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The enemies may at any moment push their siege wall, their siege tower up to the wall and try to take the city.

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So the watchman must remain vigilant. We're commanded to guard, to watch these hearts that Christ has given us until our sanctification is complete and we are glorified in his presence.

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Now, how do we do this? What I would suggest you do is this, go home this week.

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If you have a concordance, look it up in the concordance. If you have Blue Letter Bible or something like that on the internet, search up the word heart in the

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Bible and see all of the references. Now, I could preach ten sermons minimum on what it means to all the ways that we are instructed as Christians to what we are to do with our hearts.

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I'm going to highlight just a few. This is really practical, so if you're taking notes, take notes.

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We're commanded in Scripture first to love God with all of our hearts.

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The first and the best way to care for our hearts is to put it to work for God.

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In Mark 12, 30, Christ is going to teach this. He's going to say, and you shall love the

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Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And he tells us the second commandment is like it.

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You shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is the Christian's manner of living.

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The seat of the man's wheel is to be taken up with the task of loving God above all things.

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That your heart would be filled to overflowing with the love of God and the praise of God and the worship of God.

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Another way that we're to keep our hearts is this, to write God's word on your heart. We are a lazy people.

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I put myself at the front of that line. And we are not inclined to memorize the word of God.

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It's just too much work. We hope to gain it by osmosis or something like that. But the psalmist writes,

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Psalm 119, verse 11, I have stored up your word in my heart. Brothers, sisters, that's memorizing it, storing it.

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It's putting it there to access it at some point. For what purpose? That I might not sin against you.

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This wasn't even the first time that God's people were told to do this in the passage after, the next chapter after what

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Steve read, Deuteronomy 11, 18. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul.

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And you shall bind them on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

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And note this with me, especially young ones here. The world will tell you over and over and over again to follow your heart.

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That is a bold -faced lie. What you're to do is this.

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You're to take your heart. You are to subject it to the perfect word of God.

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And then with all of your heart, you're to follow his word. We're to obey

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God from the heart. Now am I teaching a works -based righteousness? No.

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But God has given us a new heart to be responsive to him and to obey him and we ought to do just that.

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Romans 6, verses 17 and 18. As we begin to go through these, you see all the mentions of the heart.

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But thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin, that's us, Christian, have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

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We're to cultivate a healthy heart with the church. There are so many people that ask, is it possible for me to be a

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Christian without going to church? My first answer is usually it's possible to be a

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Christian but it is very impossible to be a healthy Christian apart from his church.

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Colossians 3, 15 and 16. And let the peace of Christ, he's talking about the unity and the peace and the cooperation of the church.

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He says, and let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful.

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And then notice he's going to list the activities of the church. He says, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another.

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That's what we're doing now. In all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

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God has given, and most people miss this today, his church as one of the primary means by which he sanctifies and encourages our hearts.

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I won't talk about the pandemic anymore. I've talked about how discouraged I was during that time many times.

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But just to be away from the church after three and four weeks, my heart was decimated.

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Our hearts need the church. My second last point that I'll make here just in this long list of heart care is this.

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Set your heart on eternity. Ecclesiastes 3 .11 says that God has put eternity in every human heart.

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What that means is this, that everyone, whether they acknowledge it or not, lives with an impending sense that there is something greater than what

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I see in this world. They have a knowledge of God that certainly they suppress, but they have eternity.

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God has put it in their hearts. But now, brothers and sisters, that we have been called and justified and are being sanctified and will one day be glorified,

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God has put an altogether new hope in our hearts. James 5 .8 says this.

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Establish you also. Be patient. Establish your hearts. For the coming of the

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Lord is at hand. Establish your hearts. Get ready. Christ is coming back.

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He uses slightly different words, but in Colossians 3, Paul says, if then, and I ask you this, if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

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Set your minds, set your faculties, set your being on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth.

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For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

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We are not those who live and celebrate and suffer, endure and die as those who have no hope.

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No, dear ones, because of what Jesus Christ accomplished on our behalf and as a result of our trust in him, and I want you to note this, our trust in him, whether it is a very great faith or just the most minute and the weakest of faiths, because of Christ and because of Jesus Christ alone, we have, and think about this with me for a second, an eternity upon eternities before us.

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That if we are granted a deathbed, let's say, if the Lord were to give me another 50 years, and as I lay on that deathbed, the adventure that is the

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Christian life is only then just beginning.

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That in one million years, for the Christian in this room, not for the unbeliever, but for the

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Christian in this room, in one million years, after serving in his courts for one million years, it will be as if it were the first hour of the first day in light of eternity in God's presence for ever and ever and ever, and we shall see him.

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1 John 3, and we shall be like him, and we will live forever, because the

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Son of God, who became accursed on Calvary's tree for us, God has opened the door to a world that is with him and that will never perish.

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Because of Jesus Christ, the Lord our God shall live with us, and he will be our steadfast light.

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And because of Christ, we shall err his people be. How does that song go?

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What else can we say but, All glory be to Christ. All glory be to Christ my

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King. If ever he has given you a reason to live for his glory, it is surely this.

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We shall err be his people, or we shall not cease, may we not cease to pour out our hearts in sincere service to him.

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Since God has given us an eternity to live for, let us set our heart on that and live with all of our might.

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Let us store up treasure in heaven where our hearts already are. Let us forsake the fleeting pleasures of sin and greed and selfishness and everything that was on that list that Christ mentioned and seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

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Paul says, Since we have these promises, 2

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Corinthians 7 .1, Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body.

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You see this? When you have your eyes on eternity, this is what you do. Throw away the world.

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Throw away the sin that so easily entangles us. Cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God, loving him, fearing him, looking forward to being with him forever.

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How often, dear friends, do we live as if this world is our only life? We make fun of Joel Osteen and his best life now, and then the next day, we live exactly as if that book were our

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Bible. Scripture, I'll give you a list afterwards.

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I have to go through. I've skipped for the sake of time, but Scripture tells us to guard our hearts from anxiety.

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Philippians 4, 6, and 7 tells us to cultivate a generous heart.

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2 Corinthians 9, verse 7. Scripture tells us, have you ever thought about this as singing as medicine for your heart?

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To sing to God with our hearts. We're to, Ephesians 5, 19, make a melody to the

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Lord with your heart. We're to seek God in prayer with all of our hearts.

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Jeremiah 29, 13. And I left the best for last.

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We're, brothers and sisters, to fix our hearts on Christ. If you don't get this one, the rest don't matter.

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Fix your heart on Christ. When we first believed, we set our heart on Christ at the time of our salvation.

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Romans 10, 10 says, for with the heart, heart, one believes and is justified, and with the mouth, one confesses and is saved.

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Salvation certainly is. Justification certainly is a one -time act. But this looking to Christ with the eyes of our hearts is an everyday affair.

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The believer's heart must only look to Christ once a day, or once a year, or even once an hour, but 10 ,000 times a day.

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We love to quote Robert Murray McShane, for every look at Christ, take 10, sorry, for every look at self, take 10 looks at Christ.

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But let me improve upon that. As good as it is, for every look at self, take 1 ,000 looks at Christ.

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The believer's heart must dwell on Christ to the point that it is as if Christ takes up permanent residency in his heart.

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Paul prayed this, or, yes, Paul prayed this for the

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Ephesian church to this effect. He said, in Ephesians 3, 17 and 18, he prayed that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth of the love of God for us.

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John Calvin commented on that passage. He said, By faith we not only acknowledge that Christ suffered and rose from the dead on our account, but accepting the offers which he makes of himself, we possess and enjoy

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Christ as our Savior. Faith is not a distant view, notice this, but a warm embrace of Christ by which he dwells in us, and we are filled with the divine spirit.

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I'll end with this brief quote from Martin Luther. Martin Luther once taught, he was teaching, and if you know

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Martin Luther, he was very eccentric at times, but someone asked him, or maybe he was teaching on,

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I don't quite know the circumstances, what would happen when, as a believer, we become condemned by our own sin?

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And we all know that, don't we? That sense in which, I have done it again, I have sinned against God, I am unworthy,

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I am unacceptable, I've gone too far at this time. And Martin Luther said that the believer must firmly set their heart on Christ, especially when you find yourself despairing in your own sin, especially when you can feel condemned by the devil, the enemy.

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He said this, this is his quote, he said, So when the devil throws your sins in your face, and he will do it, and declares that you deserve, that you deserve death and hell, tell him this, you tell him,

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I admit, I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it?

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For I know one who suffered this word, and made satisfaction on my behalf.

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His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and where he is,

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I, there, I shall be also. How often do we fix our hearts on Christ, so that even in the darkest moments of despair, we can say where he is, because of his satisfaction on the cross, there

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I shall be also. Brother and sister in Christ, if you're a

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Christian, you will be there also. And if you're not a

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Christian, you're still in heading number one, you still have an old heart, but our prayer to God would be that you would come, and that you would have that new heart in him, that you would have everlasting life in Jesus Christ, that he would be your