The Heart of True Holiness

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.

Mark’s Gospel, His Authorship, and the Cost of Discipleship

So we're in the Gospel of Mark after an extended break. By my count, I went back and did the math. We were away from this Gospel for two months or just shy of two months. 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 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 May when we first opened this Gospel, we began to study this book and we found that this Gospel bears Mark's name. We sometimes see him called John Mark in our New Testaments, because it was likely written by him sometime in the mid-AD 50s.

And if we know anything about Mark, you'll remember that he accompanied Paul and Barnabas on a missionary journey. 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 John Mark or Mark went, except that he found himself at some point under the discipleship of the Apostle Peter.

We find that in extra-biblical evidence, and we also find that right in the Scriptures. It was in 1 Peter 5 .13 that, as Peter is finishing off that first letter, he calls John this affectionate term, he says, my son.

And so from the biblical and extra-biblical evidence, we know that it was likely Mark under the influence of Peter that wrote this Gospel. It was likely the first Gospel that was written. 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, Mark is a fast-paced Gospel that concerns itself more with the powerful working of Christ than with the specific words of Christ.

And so the whole point of this Gospel is essentially two-fold. Mark's principal goals are these. Firstly, he wants to instill in the mind of the reader a sky-high and an exalted Christology. That is, that Mark goes to great lengths to magnify 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 God.

And then 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.

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

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. 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.

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.

So chapters 1 -7, that's exactly what we find, is Mark making these cases. Jesus Christ, in Mark's own words, in chapter 1 and verse 1, is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And if we trace our way through, just if you follow along even with me, turn to chapter 1, we find Christ attesting to his divine deity by healing many, calling many of his own choosing to himself.

If we look to chapter 2, we find that Christ heals a paralytic, that he pardons sins, that he declares himself Lord of the Sabbath. In chapter 3, he draws crowds. In chapter 4, we find him teaching. Chapter 5, he sends demons into a herd of pigs.

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

In chapter 7, Jesus can be found confronting the scribes and Pharisees and annihilating their fixation with man-made, legalistic rules. And this week, what we're going to find as we continue this study, really it's part two of what Steve preached so long ago, is that these religious leaders, again, have completely misunderstood what it means to be pure and holy.

And if I could just ask you for a second, is that not true of the world in which we live today? That many misunderstand what it means to be holy, to be righteous before God. There are so many ideas in the world of what it takes to be a man who is like his God, who is pure and undefiled.

And that was the case for the scribes and Pharisees. They did not understand the true source of sin and defilement. They believed that impurity came from outside of the man. We talked about illness this afternoon, almost like a contagious illness that's in the environment and that wreaks havoc on the individual.

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.

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.

But issues of sin and defilement are in fact hard issues. You and I, all of humanity's greatest hindrance to holiness, is not out in the world. 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. 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. A new heart that only Christ can give.

And so, we're going to dive into this. Just so you know the layout of the land so you can anticipate it, I have the insert in the bulletin. The first heading, that first point that I call the heart of the problem.

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

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

Defilement Comes from the Heart, Not from External Sources

The heart of the problem. What is the heart of our holiness problem? 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 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. Mark begins by telling us that Jesus called the people to himself.

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.

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

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

This is something that Christ wants the listeners to pay attention to. And he uses a Greek word, or Mark uses a Greek word to translate him. It's the Greek word proskalaomai. It's a word that Mark uses only nine times in his gospel.

And what it's meant to be is this. It is something that is to catch the reader's attention. It is a solemn declaration. 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 Bibles in our laps, should pay attention.

And so with his listeners' attention, Jesus says this. 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.

This was no doubt in response to his previous interaction with these Pharisees who were obsessed with washing hands, of exacting rinsing of bowls and cups and all manner of items. And as we've heard already before, what Christ is doing is he's getting at the heart of the Pharisees' issues.

And he's getting really, if we look carefully, at the heart of man's issue in general. Now to speak about the Pharisees specifically, the Pharisees were unrelenting in their pursuit of ritual purity. I love studying the Pharisees on this topic because it is largely outrageous.

If it weren't sad, it would be humorous. Just to see to the lengths that the Pharisees went in order to keep themselves pure. 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

They forbid adults from drinking human breast milk, at least from the source. But if it was to be put in a bowl or a dish or a special cup, then it could be consumed. Their cash root or kosher dietary laws stipulated, and even still stipulate today, that if a Jew were to eat grapes, it had to be grapes planted and farmed by a Jewish farmer.

It was forbidden to eat grapes, and still is forbidden to eat grapes from a Gentile farmer. Or really interestingly, if you're like me and you like hot food, and so you prepare spicy hot wings. Now I'm lactose intolerant, I can't do this, but maybe the ordinary person would pour themselves a tall glass of milk.

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

And all of these rules focused on the external act of outward obedience, with no thought given to obedience at the heart level. And a perfect example of this is one such Pharisaical tradition that became known as the laws of intention.

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

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

And here as Jesus teaches this, what he's getting at is something that is altogether different from this system. Here he tells this parable to convey that defilement doesn't come from the outside, but it already exists on the inside.

And this was, in fact, such a radically countercultural teaching. I don't know if you noticed this, but Jesus teaches this parable. 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. That unrighteousness and defilement comes from within rather than from without. So in verse 17, when Christ is alone with his disciples, they ask him the meaning of this.

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? 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. 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. 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.

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

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, Peter's words in Mark's ear in Acts chapter 10, we saw that God said to Peter, what God has made clean, we do not call unclean or common.

And so here, Christ gets down to the heart of true holiness. Impurity and defilement do not come. I know that I've already said this several times, and I still do not think that you fully believe me. Impurity and defilement do not come from our environments.

They're not something on the outside that infect our souls. What defiles a person is what comes out of our hearts. We need to stop here just for a moment. 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.

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

Of the bowels. And so imagine making your Valentine's Day a card with a nice picture of the bowels on the front of the card. What we're talking about here is not the center of love and emotion, but the seat of the will.

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

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

It is in our control centers. And we discover what is in our hearts when we speak. If we look at the parallel passage that Matthew documents in Matthew 15, 11, he says this, he quotes Christ as saying,.

It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a person. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. 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 God, he reveals, in that instance, the true content of his heart. And likewise, when an individual gives thanks and speaks words of encouragement and edification and praises 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? Is it blessing or is it cursing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So deceit, are you a liar? Are you a hedonist? Are you envious? Are you slanderous? Are you prideful? Are you foolish? All of these, Christ says, come from within, come from within the heart, and defile a person.

And I love,.

I just love, I love commentators that are able to wordsmith and create pictures, and H .A. Ironside in his commentary, he says this, he says, the heart itself is like a nest of unclean birds. Picture that for a second, a nest full of unclean birds, ready to leave the nest and go out into the world.

And he says this, what a list. Who can say these things have never had any place whatsoever in our hearts, in his heart. Every man is capable of falling into every sin here mentioned. And what we see, we're not going to go into it in depth, is that this applies broadly to all of humanity.

Genesis 6 -5 tells us, before the flood, that every intention of the thoughts of man's heart was only continually evil. 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. Who can understand it? And so, this is the heart problem of every person in the world. That we cannot be righteous, even of ourselves, because we have all the wrong hardware.

We have nothing to accomplish the job of being holy, before a holy and righteous God, who demands holiness of his people. Now this is really interesting. Unlike so many passages in the Gospels, this text ends, right here.

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

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.

Now,.

I'm not sure, I'm not commending that to you, but here Christ is leaving the disciples, and the Pharisees, and the people, and even us, even you, at this point where it's all law, and no gospel. Our sin problem is radical and pervasive, and affects every faculty, and every aspect of our existence.

And so it begs the question, brother and sister, how can anyone be holy, if this is the case? How can we sit here today, with any amount of hope? Is there any escape,.

Children,.

From this fallen and defective heart, that you have been born with? 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. All that we need, we do not have. And all that we have, God would rather not see or need. 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 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. 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.

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? 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 I'm being faithful because this passage anticipates what Christ is to do in the future. And I'm just, I'm not going to preach law today and leave gospel for next week.

If we were to go back and find that astute reader and turn back in the pages of our Old Testament and turn to Ezekiel 36, 26, amongst other passages, what we would find is this, that the prophet Ezekiel, hundreds of years children before Christ, he talked that not only would 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.

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

Oh,.

In light of what we just read, is this not the most glorious line already? And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit, and I will put with, and a new spirit 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.

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

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

He went to the cross. He became accursed on our behalf. He poured out his blood on that tree that he might bring about a new covenant and give his people a new heart. In John chapter 7 and verse 38, it says, whoever believes in me, this is Christ speaking, John 7, 38, as scripture has said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

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

So the Christian, brother and sister, without going into it in every single detail today, has a new heart, and it is not a heart like we would read in Jeremiah 17, 9. If someone says that applies to the 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. 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.

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.

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

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

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

Now, as God's wise providence would have it, just a few days later, 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, Tucker Booth stood at the front of the room, he looked down at the body of his wife, and he said, the other day 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, I tell you, after the death of my wife, that Christ is sufficient. And why is that? 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, I tell you that though my wife is gone and my children are motherless, Christ speaks comfort to me today. Tucker's life was turned upside down, but by God's grace, at the time of his conversion, Christ had given him a new heart, a heart that was flowing to overflowing, filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit, a heart that was not cold, stone cold, but a heart of flesh that could love 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 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, I surrender to him. That is just one picture of what it means to have a new heart in Christ, a heart that loves God and trusts God and looks to him for hope.

Guarding the New Heart by Loving God, Hiding His Word, and Fixing on Eternity

Now, brothers and sisters, what do we do with this new heart? If Christ has given you a new heart, do you treat it the way that I often treat my shoes? 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 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.

Do you treat your heart the way that I treat my shoes, as if it were disposable? Just recently I went to a store and I bought myself a nice pair of hunting boots, and for the first time ever in my life, I looked at the care instructions, and I bought what I needed to take care of my shoes.

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. This is what it means now to guard our new hearts.

We have a mandate to cultivate our hearts. In Proverbs 4 .23 it says this, Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow springs of life. If you're a Christian and you have a heart that Christ has given you, you are now commanded to keep it.

Now, I'm not talking about keeping yourself saved, don't confuse me, but of nourishing and caring for this heart. In Proverbs 4 .23 where the writer says keep your heart with all vigilance, he uses a military term.

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

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. Now, how do we do this?

What I would suggest you do is this. Go home this week. 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 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. I'm going to highlight just a few. This is really practical, so if you're taking notes, take notes.

We're commanded in Scripture first to love God with all of our hearts. The first and the best way to care for our hearts is to put it to work for God. In Mark 12, 30, Christ is going to teach this. He's going to say, And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.