Shepherding the Heart

Introduction

Well, good morning, everybody. I’m going to ask you to take your Bible, turn to Matthew chapter 12. Matthew chapter 12. We’ll begin by reading a passage there in just one second. Appreciate all of you being here today. Enjoyed worshiping with you. And I look forward to studying God’s word with you this morning. Matthew chapter 12. Matthew chapter 12, beginning in verse 33. Jesus has been having a struggle with the Pharisees. And here he’s talking about the state, the condition of their hearts. And he identifies their bad hearts as the root of the problem they’ve been having at this moment. So he says to them in verse 33 either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad. For the tree is known by its fruit.

You brood of vipers. How can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. The good man brings out of his good treasure what is good. And the evil man brings out of his evil treasure what is evil. Now, we’re gonna get to that passage and connect that to the lesson in just a second, but first I want to tell you a little bit about my groceries. Sometimes, when you get groceries, you end up with a situation where you get everything you want except for the one thing that you really need. Leah and I, for the past few years, have used a grocery delivery service. Do you guys have one of those? You have groceries delivered to your house.

I saw a commercial for H E B delivering groceries last night. Is that true? Do they deliver now? That’s pretty great. We don’t like H E B. Well, that’s not true. Someone in my family doesn’t like H E B. But we love our grocery delivery service. You order the groceries online, you schedule delivery time, and then they drop the stuff off at your front door, and that’s really nice. It’s fast and convenient and helpful, except for those rare occasions when it’s not. Because sometimes when you use one of those services, what you’ll do is the person will go to fill your order and they’ll realize that what you want is out of stock or it’s not what they said they had, and so they’ll make a substitution.

If you don’t catch that on time on the app, they’ll just go ahead and make the substitution without you checking it off. And then they deliver the groceries to your door, and sometimes that leaves you in a situation where you get all the stuff that you wanted, except for that one thing that you actually needed. You open up those bags and you think we’ve got Pop Tarts and raspberries and Doritos, coffee beans, but the one thing we needed was milk. That’s the reason I made the whole order in the first place, and that’s the one thing that’s missing. That happened to me one time recently. We were we had everything that we needed in the house, except we were we want to have a bonfire and roast some marshmallows, and we didn’t have marshmallows.

So we started our grocery order because the one thing we wanted was marshmallows. And then we added a bunch of stuff to that order, and then when they filled the order, they realized they didn’t have large marshmallows. The only thing they had in stock was mini marshmallows. So they made a substitution thinking, well, mini marshmallow, large marshmallow, what’s the difference? And you try to put that thing on a poker and roast it, and you realize what the difference is. We had everything that we wanted, except the one thing that we really needed. It seems to me that we can fall into a similar trap when it comes to our job as parents in raising our kids. That it’s possible as parents to give our kids everything we want to give them, everything they want, except for the one thing that they really need.

Now, I don’t think it’s fair to say that our kids are neglected these days. Maybe that was true in another time, but I think that as parents, if you look by and large across the landscape of parenting these days, I think it’s pretty obvious that parents try very hard to give their kids a lot, to give them a lot of time and attention. We do a lot of stuff for our kids. We want to give them a good childhood, we want them to have good memories, we want them to have fun toys, we want them to have wonderful experiences. We want them to look back on their childhood and realize that their life was full of blessings. We do a lot for our kids. We are not neglectful of them.

If anything, we’re too immeshed in their lives. But as parents, sometimes we need to ask ourselves the question. As I give my kids all of this good stuff, have I lost sight of what’s most important? Have I forgotten to give them the one thing that they really need? And before we go any further in this lesson, I want to make it very clear this morning that I do not come to you as an authority giving you my expert opinion. I come to you as a lowly comrade who is muddling through this parenting thing myself. And you guys, many of you have a lot more experience than I do. But we do have to ask ourselves the question are we forgetting to give our kids the one thing that they really need?

And what is that one thing? What do our kids really need from us more than anything else? I guess we could phrase that a number of different ways. We could say, we need to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That’s good biblical language. We could say we need to raise them to know God and understand his will for their lives. That’s good biblical idea too. But Brent and I, as we’re embarking upon this series of sermons together, we’ve landed on this terminology. The one thing that we need to give our kids as parents is we need to make sure we shepherd their hearts. We need to shepherd their hearts. And that means as parents, we need to focus on molding not just the behavior of our kids, we need to mold the hearts of our children so that they one day will choose for themselves to serve the Lord.

And Brent and I strongly feel that focusing on the heart of a child is the key. Because Scripture constantly reinforces this truth. That the condition of your heart will always determine the quality of your character. Always. The condition of your heart will always determine the quality of your character. It is a law of human life. It is a fundamental reality of the universe, that your heart will determine the kind of person that you are. And the Bible points to that in a number of different ways. In Proverbs 4 and verse 23, this is what Solomon was talking about when he said, Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. That’s what he’s saying. The condition of your heart determines what flows out in your actions.

Jesus is going to talk about this in Luke 6 and verse 45. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good. The evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil. For his mouth speaks from that which fills the heart. Jesus is talking about how you, when you make your decisions, you are drawing those decisions from somewhere. They all come from the same place. They come from your heart. They come from within you. And so if you’ve only stored up bad stuff, you just cannot pull good stuff out of that. Jesus, we read this earlier in Matthew 12. Matthew, oh, that should say Matthew 12. I’m sorry, it says Matthew 13. Matthew 12, he says, either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad.

For the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. The condition of your heart will always determine the quality of your character. And by the way, I think when you read Galatians 5, you read about the fruit of the Spirit, I think Paul is actually emphasizing that same truth there. In Galatians 5, he says this in verse 22 the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Against such things there is no law. And I think sometimes we read the fruit of the Spirit and we think to ourselves, oh, look, there’s nine things God wants me to do better.

That is not the point of the verse. Because he says these are fruits. Fruit is something that is produced by something else. The point of Galatians 5 is not, here are nine things you need to do better in your life. The point is that when you allow the Holy Spirit to transform your heart, this is the inevitable result.

A life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. His point is that when the Spirit has changed your heart, this is the inevitable result. The condition of your heart will always determine the quality of your character. And what that means is that as parents, we must focus on the hearts of our kids. And that’s that’s a deeper, that’s a deeper struggle. Because sometimes as parents, what we want to do, what we really want to do is just control our kids and restrain them. And if they may have muscles, that gets really hard to do. But we need to understand that controlling our kids will not work.

Now, by no means am I saying those things are wrong. Should you control your kids to the best of your ability? Yes. Should you restrain their behavior? Yeah, especially when they’re younger. You gotta do that sometimes. Do you need to know about what’s going on with your kids? Yeah, you should try to do that. But you need to understand that controlling and restraining and surveilling them is not sufficient in and of itself. Because those things do not by themselves impact their hearts. And the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart. Let me give you an example of that. I want you to imagine that I invited you over to my house into the backyard to drink some lemonade. So you come to my house, you knock on the door, I take you to the back.

We’re sitting on the porch drinking lemonade, and off in the back dark corner of my backyard, you hear this low rumbling growl. And you look, and there’s a doghouse back there, and you see a chain leading into it, and then all of a sudden you see these red eyes pop wide open, and you start to get a little freaked out, and I look at you and say, oh, don’t worry, that’s my dog. Her name’s Daisy. And she comes out snarling and barking and slobber is everywhere, and she goes to the end of that chain and pulls it tight and wants to come at you. And I look at you and I say, Don’t worry. Daisy’s the best dog in the world. She’s never bitten anyone.

Is Daisy a good dog? No. Daisy is a restrained dog. She is a controlled dog. There’s a difference between affecting the heart of a dog to the point where it can go off leash and actually be nice to people and just simply restraining it and keeping it from biting people. We need to understand that as parents, our job is to not merely control or restrain. Our job is to mold the hearts of our children so that they choose for themselves to serve the Lord. And that brings us to the real question that we should consider this morning. Oh, I got ahead of myself. How do you do that? How do you mold a heart? How do you tend a heart and make it good? I want to give you four ideas.

1. Hearts Are Transformed by the Gospel

And before I get into those, I want you to understand the good news about this morning is if you’re sitting here and you’re not a parent and you may never even intend to be a parent, or you’re one of those people who says, hey, I did that parenting long ago and I’m not getting into that again, understand that the principles we’re going to talk about, they’re going to be specifically applied to parenting, but they’re true for everybody. If you want a good heart, here’s what I believe the Bible teaches us about how to make that happen. Understand this first of all. That hearts are transformed by the gospel. Hearts are transformed only by the gospel. When Jesus tells us the parable of the sower in Luke 8, he talks about four different kinds of soil.

And I want you to notice what he says about the good soil. In Luke 8 and verse 15, he says this, but the seed in the good soil, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart and hold it fast and bear fruit with perseverance. Now, one of the things I like to point out point out about the parable of the sower is the thing that makes the good soil good is the fact that it is just soil. You think about the other three soils, the thing that makes them bad is that they aren’t just raw soil. Like the wayside soil, it’s hardened and the seed can’t get in. The rocky ground, well, it has rocks that prevent root growth.

And the thorny soil, it has thorns that choke the word and prevent it from bearing fruit. The thing about the good soil is not that it’s good because somebody spread miracle grow on it, or there’s something special about it. It’s just dirt. And because it’s just dirt, it receives the seed, and the seed is what transforms it. What the Bible teaches us is that hearts are changed and transformed when they receive the seed. They are transformed by the Spirit and by the gospel. We need to understand as parents that we cannot transform our own hearts. And we do not have the power by ourselves to transform the hearts of our kids. The only one who can transform the hearts of your children is God. In fact, he promises that.

You look in Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 36 in verse 26, remember this promise that God makes. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to observe my ordinances. Who’s the one who gives us a new heart? Who’s the one who changes and transforms us? Not us. God does that. In Romans 12 and verse 2, remember that Paul says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Paul says, but we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the Spirit. Do you understand what Paul is saying there? He’s saying the thing that transforms us, the thing that makes us more like Jesus is when we see Jesus. You want to know what’s going to transform your heart? You want to know what’s going to transform the heart of your kids. Seeing Jesus. Seeing his love. Seeing his sacrifice, seeing the lengths he’s gone to save you, seeing the value that you have in his eyes, seeing the horror and the beauty of the cross, seeing who you were and where you were headed before God intervened to save you.

Seeing that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but should have everlasting life. You want to know what changes a heart, the gospel does. And so hearts that hear that message and accept it and receive it, those are the hearts that are changed by it. So what does that mean as parents? It means that my first priority in life is to connect my child’s heart to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And understand, that means more than teaching them rules and teaching them doctrines. And sometimes we make that mistake. We think, look, I need to teach them about Jesus. I need to teach them what’s right and what’s wrong, right? Go to church, don’t steal, don’t hit.

They need to know all that stuff. And understand those things are important to talk about. And we’re going to talk about those in just a second. But first and foremost, it’s not about doctrines and rules. It’s about understanding what Jesus did on the cross to save all of us. They need to know that. They need to see that. And understand that. And I got to tell you, I’m not sure exactly what that looks like practically in your life. That may look a number of different ways over the course of your parenting life. But maybe it starts here. Maybe it starts by setting an example in showing them that we understand those first two beatitudes. In Matthew 5, verse 3 through 4, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

And blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Maybe that’s where I start when it comes to connecting my kids’ heart to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Maybe it starts by making sure they understand this about mom and dad. That we are spiritually bankrupt before God. That there is nothing we can give to God to make up for what we’ve done to God. And that the only reason we have any hope in the world is because God did something to save us, not we did something to save ourselves. Make sure that they understand you’re the kind of person who mourns. You mourn over the fact that your sins separated you from God, but you don’t stay in that mourning state because those who mourn shall be comforted.

2. Good Hearts Are Filled with the Spirit

You understand and you live with joy because even though you separated yourself from God has done something to save you, and you responded to that gospel and you were saved by it when you obeyed it. Maybe that’s where we start. Tell your kids how Jesus changed your life. Tell your kids who you’d be without Jesus. Tell them that you were a sinner and that God fixed you. Help them see the beauty of the gospel in your life. That’s the first priority. Hearts are transformed by the gospel. But understand this secondly that good hearts are also filled with the Spirit. As a parent, my job should be not just to connect them to the gospel, but to do everything I can to fill my kids’ hearts to the brim with the gospel and with the message that the Spirit has preserved for us.

Paul talks about this in Ephesians 5 in verse 18. He says, and do not get drunk with wine, for that is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. And I love the contrast that he draws there. He talks about somebody who gets drunk with wine. He talks about somebody who is a wine drinker, right? He says some people go out there, and all they do is they fill their lives up with alcohol, right? They want to guzzle it down, they want to drink as much as they can, and they drink all the time. They fill themselves up with as much alcohol as they possibly can. And Paul says, don’t you dare spend your life in Christ doing that. That is waste. He says, instead, what you need to do is fill yourself with the Spirit.

What those people do with alcohol, you need to do with the message of God. Fill yourselves up with it as much as you possibly can. Keep it close to you. Fill your life with it. Drown yourself in it. Let it fill you up to the brim. There’s a coffee shop back in Tampa that I love to go to. And every time I go, I get a cappuccino because you got to get a cappuccino at this place because it’s just so good. And you can’t get it to go. Because you can’t, if you do you know this, you can’t enjoy a cappuccino in one of those to-go cups. You just can’t. Because it’s like, it’s like 66% foam, right? And you have to be able to see that and maybe even touch it.

Like in that’s the only way to really enjoy a cappuccino. But when you get a cappuccino at this place, they bring out this big cup, right? And they fill it up for you, and they give you a little spoon to go beside it, and they do the latte art on the top of it, and they fill it all the way up past the brim of the cup. You can look at it sideways, and you can see the foam is actually above the cup. They did everything they could to get as much coffee in that cup as they possibly could. And I think that’s what we need to be aiming for as parents when it comes to filling our kids’ hearts with the Spirit. We need to make sure that we fill them up with the gospel and with the teachings and doctrines as much as we possibly can.

Drown them in it. Fill their life with it. You cannot give them too much of the gospel. You cannot give them too much teaching about Jesus. Understand, brothers and sisters, that when it comes to filling our kids’ lives with the Spirit, this is where we make deep investments of time, energy, and resources. And too often the temptation is to invest deeply in other places, isn’t it? We want to invest deeply in academics. We want to invest deeply in sports. We want to invest deeply in recreation and doing all these kids, that’s going to make their life on earth better when they’re older. And too often, that’s the temptation. I feel it myself. I struggle with that myself, don’t you? I want to fill their lives with all these worldly things to make sure their life on earth works and that they’re really well rounded as a human being.

3. Good Hearts Are Undivided

And I make the minimum possible investment when it comes to filling them up with the Spirit. That is backwards. Fill them up as deeply as you possibly can with the Spirit. With the gospel, with the teachings, with the doctrines. You cannot give them too much. Understand this thirdly. That good hearts are undivided. I want to take you back and consider again the parable of the sower. And I want you to focus specifically on what is said about the third soil, because I think it’s particularly important when it comes to raising kids. And in Matthew chapter 13 and verse 22, he talks about what the thorny ground represents. And he says, and the one on whom seed was sown among the thorns, this is the man who hears the word, and the worry of the world, and the deceitfulness of wealth, choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.

Now, one of the things that I want you to appreciate is that sometimes we misread this parable. Maybe you never have. I certainly have. And one of the mistakes we make is we think that the fate of that third thorny ground soil is that it dies. Right? It’s just like the other ones. The seed falls on the wayside ground, and the birds eat it, and it dies. The seed falls on the rocky ground, and the sun scorches it and it dies. And it falls among the thorns, and the thorns eat it alive and it dies. That’s not what it says. What is the fate of the thorny ground soil? Not that it dies, but that it becomes unfruitful. Understand this. That this symbol, this parable is not about how your kids might leave Jesus and become a Muslim, or they might join the denomination down the street, or lose their faith and become an atheist.

That’s not the concern here with the thorny ground. The concern is this: that they would grow up and sit in a pew for the rest of their life, always showing up for church, yet never produce anything in the kingdom. Because their hearts are full of thorns. They are too concerned with so many distractions in this life. There are too many other things vying for their resources and attention that they never are able to produce anything for God. As the parable says, the thorns choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. That’s a fate that we need to avoid. That’s the fate we need to help our kids avoid. And as parents, our job is to help our kids remove those thorns. As parents, it is our job to show our kids where the weeds are.

And when necessary, use our parental authority to rip those weeds out ourselves. As parents, we must make it clear to our kids that we will not let their lives and their hearts get too crowded. We will not let that happen. And I think that means that we do that by setting first a good example ourselves, that we show our kids in our own lives that we aren’t thorny soil, right? That we are not so distracted by so many things that we don’t bear any fruit in the kingdom. And I think that also means, secondly, that sometimes as parents, we gotta make unpopular decisions and we gotta rip those thorns out of our kids’ hearts when they really want those thorns to still be in there. We have to be willing to say to our kids, no, you’re not going on that trip.

4. Good Hearts Are Focused on Good Things

No, you’re not going to play travel ball this year. No, you’re not gonna spend time with that friend. No, you’re not gonna have a phone, and you’re not gonna be on social media. Because I, as your parent, as your mother, as your father, will not allow your heart to get too crowded. Now, understand this morning, I am not issuing edicts, and I’m not saying that any of those things are wrong. I’m just giving you examples of what weed pulling might look like in your life. We need to understand that good hearts are undivided hearts, and we need to shepherd our children’s hearts to make sure their hearts are free from thorns. And finally, let me say this: that good hearts are focused on good things. And I think this is where we do a lot of legwork and oversight as parents.

We need to recognize that we have in our care young, impressionable souls, that God has entrusted to us precious hearts that are unformed and uninfluenced by the things of this world. And we need to appreciate that’s a double edged sword. On one hand, that’s a great blessing, right? It means that I can instill values in my kids without anybody else touching them or tainting them or influencing them another way. I can instill in their life habits and attitudes that are gonna stick with them for the rest of their lives that will be a blessing to them.

But on the other hand, it also means I need to be careful about everything that they see and hear. Part of shepherding a heart is taking ownership for the influences that are allowed into your children’s life. We need to be careful who ascends into the pulpit of their heart and is allowed to preach to them every single day. That’s something about a church, right? Churches protect their pulpits. Some more than others, but we do. You guys, the elders don’t just let anybody get up here and preach. You don’t pull some Joe off the street to get up here and start teaching doctrine. And the reason why you protect the pulpit, you make sure you vet your preachers and you make sure you have good, solid people teaching the Bible up here is because you understand that people are influenced by the things they see and they hear.

And you guys don’t want to put somebody up here who is going to lead people astray or teach them something wrong or lead them in a way that’s going to be evil. We need to understand that when our kids go out and live their lives, all the things they interact with are speaking, are preaching to their heart. The things they see online, the friends they have at school, the attitudes that they see displayed in the people who are out and about, the attitude and example that you set yourself, all of these things are sermons that are being preached straight into their hearts. And as parents, it is our job to protect that pulpit. To make sure that they are getting influenced by good things. In Philippians 4 in verse 8, Paul talks about this.

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence, and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. As parents, it is our job to recognize that our kids are not mature enough to make those decisions for themselves. And that it is our job to exercise oversight, to shepherd their hearts, to make sure that the influences in their lives align with the kind of things that Paul talks about in Philippi 4 and verse 8. That means, as a parent, I need to spend some time thinking about what kind of entertainment my kids take in. That means again, I need to be willing to make hard, unpopular choices about what kind of influences are going to be in their lives.

That means, as a parent, I need to make sure I’m not only eliminating the negative, but I’m pushing the positive. I’m not just trying to say, hey, don’t watch bad stuff. I am actively trying to put good things in front of them day after day. And maybe more than anything, that means as a parent, I spend my time trying my best to give them an excellent example in my own life. Good hearts are focused on good things. As parents, it is our job to shepherd the hearts of our children, to influence and mold their hearts so that they become the kind of people who choose God for themselves. And it’s important that we focus on the heart because the condition of the heart will always determine the quality of their character.

Conclusion

And as we already talked about this morning, a good heart, having a good heart, it starts by seeing the gospel. It starts by seeing Jesus. Maybe you’re sitting here this morning and you’re thinking to yourself, none of this parenting stuff applies to me. I’m not even a Christian yet. I haven’t done any of this stuff. Well, I want to encourage you to see Jesus this morning. The Bible tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but should have everlasting life. The Bible tells us that Jesus died on a cross and he was buried in a tomb and he was raised the third day. It tells us that if we believe he’s the Son of God, if we’re willing to confess that faith before men, repent of our sins, and be baptized in water, we can have the remission of our sins.

Become a child of his, have the hope of heaven in our hearts, and live for him the rest of our days. If you’re ready to stop living for yourself, if you see Jesus this morning and you want to become a child of God, we invite you to come to the front while we stand and while we sing.