The Heart Of The Matter

Introduction

So tonight, the title of the lesson is The Heart of the Matter. And the heart is something that I’ve been thinking about for about a year. I had an epiphany in the foyer talking to Tony one night, and I just I can’t understand why people don’t get it. God just wants your heart. And I’m like, wow. That’s true. Why can’t we do it? It’s such a simple thing. Why do we miss that God wants our heart? So this lesson has taken many different variations in the last week. So the Shell Houston Open ended today in great golf fashion. And the company I work for provides the equipment out there. So I had the distinct pleasure, I guess you would call it, of volunteering out there in the evenings for maintenance.

And so when I agreed to speak this evening, I’m like, it’s perfect. I’ll have a week to go ahead and just polish everything off. Well, this week I left the house about seven every morning, give or take, and I got home between 11 and 1 at night. So I didn’t have the time to do exactly what I wanted. But after hearing the lesson this morning, everything fell right into place. This is, I’m I’m very excited about 98% of what I had to say tonight. The 2% I’m not excited about, I made up my own definition. So what I would ask, I’m going to try to define the heart.

My definition sounds like a Webster definition. But when you get right down into it, what is the heart? So we’re going to talk about that tonight. The picture up here, Julianne and I had the pleasure of going to Italy in January, and when we were here at the Villa de Este in Tiboli, which is near Texas, that’s Taiboli, the town.

This estate has hundreds of fountains, and they’re all naturally fed. So you wonder how did they make a fountain back in 1550? That’s when that one was used. There’s no pump that runs that. They piped water in from the river on the other side of the mountain that’s behind me when I’m taking that picture to pressure that fountain and the other hundred or so on property, including one that shoots water 40 feet in the air. We’re going to talk about your heart and how to guard it. And a verse we’ve used in the parenting class. And the fountain represents something in this picture.

I had two other things I was going to say. We’re going to dive right in. Let’s go ahead and turn over to Luke 12 and 28. This is part of the passage that we read this morning where Jesus appears to the men on the road to Emmaus.

I apologize. Oh, is that a different verse? No. And it reads.

That is the wrong verse. That should be Luke 24. I apologize. Luke chapter 24 and verse 28. We’ll get the hiccup over with right here at the very beginning.

1. What Is the Heart?

We’re going to read a little more than what’s on the screen. Alright, so let’s just pick up in verse 32. They said to each other, these are the two men who are on the road to Emma. Did not our hearts burn within us when he talked to us on the road while he opened to us the scriptures. I just wanted to jump off of that one verse that Jesse did a great job just taking this passage and working with it this morning. When their heart burned within them, did they have crawfish that day? Did they have heartburn? We’re not talking about our physical heart here. So what is the heart? Where is it located? If you have to take your heart out on your body, where is it?

Well, somewhere between here and here, right? I think we can all agree the Bible talks about the heart in many different ways. And it does talk about the physical heart. And there are times where it says, and take heart or have courage. But it talks about this internal thing that is the heart a lot. Just in a quick search, after I read out all of the verses on the heart in the ESV, there are well over a hundred that cover this topic. So let’s try to define the heart. What is it? It’s this thing in us, right? So let’s start with what it’s not. It’s not entirely your soul. And it’s not entirely your mind, and it’s not entirely your body. How can I be so confident to say that?

Well, what is the greatest commandment? That Jesus repeats. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all of thy heart and with all of thy strength and with all of thy mind and with all of thy soul. If he’s going to take all four of those things separately, they can overlap. But they are all four independent things. So, our question, what’s the heart? Here’s my working definition. I put working up there just so you know. I thought about this a lot. This is where it stands right now. It is a blend of conscience, thought, and desire. Which at its core can influence or control judgment or action. So that’s basically a blend of your mind and your soul and what’s inside you that controls you. When we start to read about the heart, we’ll notice that our words are tied to our heart.

I think y’all covered this in James this morning. Where it talks about an unbridled tongue. Well, if you keep looking, just down a couple more verses, it talks about the heart. And if you can condition your heart to have the right heart that you should have, the one that God wants, these other things will take care of themselves.

2. Above All Else, Guard Your Heart

Why is this important? Let’s turn over to chapter to Proverbs chapter 4. This is the verse that came up in the parenting class. We’re talking about our children. And the title of the book is Shepherding the Child’s Heart, I believe. And so we have talked about having their heart be in subjection to their parents, just like our hearts should be in subjection to God. And this parenting class that Sean has helped to get together and teach has really helped me to understand a little more about what I was searching for in the heart. So let’s look at Proverbs chapter 4. And we’re going to read this whole context here. Because if you talk to any of the kids in the high school class, if you don’t read it in context, what are you reading?

So that’s what we’re studying in the high school class. We’re going to read verses 20 through 27. And I’m reading out of the ESV here. Does my son be attentive to my words, incline your ear to my sayings? Let them not escape from your sight.

For they are life for those who find them, and healing to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life.

Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you. Let your eyes look directly forward and your gaze be straight before you. Ponder the path of your feet, and all your ways will be sure. Do not swear to the right or to the left. Turn your foot away from evil. So we have our topic mentioned twice here. What I have on the bottom of the screen is out of the NIV. I like the way it rendered it a little better. So on the screen we have, above all else, guard your heart. For everything you do flows from it. In the high school class again, anywhere you see four or therefore, or any wrap up words, you have to look at what’s before it.

So from your heart flows everything you do. So your heart’s going to shape your actions, right? Y’all may have noticed in the next verse. Pardon me, this is verse 23, but in verse 24 it says, put away from you crooked speech. Guard your heart from crooked speech. Teach yourself not to say the things you should not say, whether it be profanity or gossiping, or there are plenty of things that we could say that we’re better off just biting our tongue and putting away from us. If we can start to do these things with our speech, then we can start to control our heart. And when how do you control your heart and what comes out? It’s not what comes into a man that defiles him, but it’s what comes out.

I think you all recognize that passage. So when we can guard our hearts from what’s coming out, that is the goal.

So when do we notice our heart? This thing that’s in us. So I think Jesse, about a week ago, really knew exactly where it was. The birth of a child. I remember holding Elijah for the first time that night when he didn’t sleep at all. And looking at it and feeling that weight of responsibility and knowing inside, this is what I have to do. And this is my job as a father, and this he has become part of me and my being, and that part of my being is he is part of my heart. And I’m going to do everything I can to help him. And I knew exactly where my heart was at that time. When I was baptized. When I came up out of the water that day, August 16th, 16 years ago, getting old.

I could have told you exactly where my heart was and the condition it was in. Had I guarded it at that point? Not like I have today. I’ve matured some since then. In 16 years. I hope I would. When you have these major life-changing events like the birth of a child or baptism, when you dedicate your life to God, when we moved to Rockport, and then when we moved back, both knew exactly what was going on inside of me. And then also when my grandfather passed away.

These are times that give us insight into where it is and what it is, and here’s why it’s important. The ESV tells us in verse 23. Above all else, to guard your heart because everything you do flows from it. So everything we talk about tonight. Remember this. This is where my fountain comes in. That river that powers this fountain. If it runs dry, that fountain’s just a rock bowl sitting up there. All of those fountains, they don’t look like fountains. They don’t look like bird bass. They look way out of place. They protect this river because of this villa that sits up here. And they protect the water that comes down, just like they tried to do at the Rio Grande. You know, the Rio Grande doesn’t make it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico anymore because they’re using all the water for other things.

3. The Hard Heart

That should never happen here because they protect the source for these fountains. So tonight we’re going to continue talking about protecting the source of what comes out of you and the things you do. And we’re going to look at three different types of hearts. We’re going to start off with what it shouldn’t be the hard heart. By no means are we going to cover every condition of the heart tonight. We find in the Bible many different descriptors for the heart. You can have a childlike heart, you can have a hard heart, you can have an evil heart of unbelief. And we could go on with more. I wanted to have one that we shouldn’t, and then there’s going to be two that we should. So who in the Bible, the first character you think of with a hard heart?

I thought of Pharaoh. His heart wasn’t just, we weren’t told that it was hard just at one period of time. He had many opportunities to do the right thing, and he never did. He always resisted God. In Pharaoh’s case, you can see before every plague, he was given the opportunity to let the Israelites go, and it said his heart was hardened. Well, his heart, what hardens a heart? He had a free workforce there. It was greed. It was the power he had, having his people in subjection to him. And he wasn’t going to give up that power to let God’s people go. Pharaoh is just the easiest example of a hard heart. Turn over to Hebrews chapter 3. In this text, again, if you’re in the high school class, you should notice this.

It’s probably either in italics or it’s indented because it is a quotation. Hebrews is good at quoting scripture. It quotes a lot of the Old Testament. This is going to come from Psalm 95. We’re going to start in Hebrews chapter 3 in verse 7. And we’re going to read down through verse 14. So the setting for where this is quoted from the children of Israel. They have left Egypt. They’ve crossed the Red Sea, and they’re getting thirsty and they’re running out of water. And this is where they start to rebel because they don’t have water. Well, maybe we should just go back to Egypt and had some more water. And this is where Moses ends up bringing water from the rock. So let’s read what it says.

Beginning in verse 7. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion on that day of testing in the wilderness, for your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years. Therefore, I was provoked with that generation and said, They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known my ways. As I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. So that’s the end of the quotation. Let’s continue reading for two more verses. Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be pardoned by the deceitfulness of sin.

So we have this glimpse back into history in a story that we’re pretty familiar with. And we have some nice insight here where their hearts were hardened in the rebellion. This is when they rebelled against God because they weren’t having the water. And you see what happened to them. They ended up wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. In verse 10, there’s this interesting little tidbit here. It says, They always go astray in their heart. They have not known my ways. So how can we avoid having a hard heart and going astray in what we do? Like it says here, in they have not known my ways. Well, it’s pretty easy. We need to know his ways, right? So how do we do that? Well, we’re going to get to that a little bit later.

In verse 12, take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. Now let’s talk about a hard heart real quick. And I’m going to draw a little parallel. Pardon me. When I was in Rockport in our little 1300, 1400 square foot house, we had 12 inches of rain in about three hours, and water came in the back door. These beautiful double French doors that we all love that have a gas. Water comes in. And it soaked the carpet. So we ripped out the carpet and among other things. We ended up laying tile on the floor, which I learned on that floor. Mortar is a neat little thing. It’s going to stick to concrete, it’s going to stick to the tile.

You mix it up with a gallon of water and 40 pounds of mortar mix. You get it going, you mix it up, you let it sit, you mix it up again, and then you start to work it and you start to lay your tile.

Y’all’s faces are like, where is he going with this? I’m getting there, I promised. So when you go to start laying your tile, you’ve got a bucket. You’ve got a five-gallon bucket with 40 pounds of mortar mix in it. And you get going, start laying tile. And you start getting towards the middle or the bottom of the bucket, and you never can get it all out. You’ve got this little film around the edges. Well, when you get the stuff thin, it likes to dry quicker. Well, when it dries, it gets hard. And it’s useless. And it’s a pain. Because if you take your trowel and you dip it in the bucket, you knock some of those hard chips off in your mortar, and you pull it out and you go to spread it, these chunks just rip lines in your mortar and their way spread.

How much of your heart needs to be hard before Satan owns you?

If you have those chips from the edge of the bucket that get into your mortar, your mortar can become useless. And it can actually become detrimental. It’s very important that we recognize that God wants your heart. He doesn’t want most of it or some of it.

And quite simply, if we’re not giving him all of our heart, then we’re not doing what he’s asked us to. So next time you see a tile floor, and you see that nice pretty mortar or the grout lines you see, and that nice level tile, you don’t hear any hollow tiles underneath, which is what would happen if you drug one of those chips across there and left a gap under your tile. Hollow thud. Remember. All it takes is a little bit of your heart to be hard to ruin the finished product.

4. A Faithful Heart

So what can we do to fix this? In your mortar, you scrape it up, you put it in another bucket, and it’s trash. You take away the hard part. With mortar, there’s no way to re-soften it. You just can’t remix it. Some things you can add water to and remix it. Not with mortar. With your heart, you can fix it. There are some things you may need to just cut away. But thankfully, we can do that. Let’s talk about something much more upbeat. So the next two, we’re going to talk about a faithful heart and a loving heart. And these are characteristics that we’ve talked about before that we should, that should come from us. That should influence our decisions. So we talk about a faithful heart.

Faith is a cornerstone of Christianity. And not just a faith where, yes, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And that he died on the cross for my sins, and that he was raised on the third day, and he sits at the right hand of God, and he has the power to cleanse my sins. Let’s go to the bar.

That’s not how it works. You can have all the faith in the world that Jesus Christ did those things and not have it affect your heart. Let’s turn over to Romans 10, 9 and 10. We’ve all heard this verse before. It’s pretty familiar, wouldn’t you? But let’s look at it in the context of our hearts.

Beginning in verse 9. Let’s begin in verse 8 so we don’t start in the middle of the sentence. But what does it say? The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified. And with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be pushed to shame. We just talked about this verse in the high school class as one of the most misused verses in the Bible. When I was doing the research for this, I actually found Satan’s top five favorite verses.

This was one of them. Because if you just read this verse and you take it just at face value, then what I just said before, Jesus Christ did these things, let’s go to the bar. It’s not going to affect your life at all. I have a footnote in my Bible from something that Tony said in verse 10 says, For with the heart one believes and is justified. That justification, if you have an American standard version, it’s going to read, Resulting in righteousness. Which I like that translation a lot better. Because if you believe with your heart, it’s going to result in righteousness. It’s going to change how you act. The rest of my note says, this shows that belief and faith will change our actions. At the end of the day, we talked about at the very beginning, our heart controls us.

Not what comes in, but it’s what goes out. So when we start to condition our heart in a faithful way, in a way where it’s not just that we believe in Jesus, but it’s that we believe he has this power, and we believe it to a point that it changes us. Well, how should it change you? Well, we’re told to, when we’re baptized, to put off the old man. Those old things you were doing, that were hard spots in your heart, that were chips in the mortar, to put them away from us. So that we can grow in faith, and that we can grow in our actions, and so that we can be a more complete Christian and we can do the will of God better.

Where is this faith generated from?

I like asking questions that are answered in the same verse.

Totally just lost my plans. So where does our faith come from? It says if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the scripture says, everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. So our faith should come from Jesus. It should come from the fact that he did what he did, and we believe that, and we have faith that the Bible tells us a true story, and that we’re not believing in vain. And if we believe that, then our faith should be able to increase.

5. A Loving Heart

What is it? Mark 12 and 29. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul, with all thy strength. That comes from Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 4. Let’s go back there and let’s read the whole context there.

So beginning in verse 4, we’ll read through verse 9. It says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall find them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

This is actually God, Jehovah God, that is mentioned here in Deuteronomy. We see this lifestyle that’s portrayed. So how do we show that we love the Lord? Well, this says these words I command you today shall be on your heart. So to love your Lord your God. So we’re back into that placing you that somewhere around here that start to shape your actions. So your actions should be shaped by these things, by your love of God, by your faith in him, by loving him with all your might, with all your heart, with all your soul. Look at the lifestyle that’s portrayed here and find the gap for me. Find where this conditioned heart takes a day off. Or takes an hour off.

We tend to take time off throughout the day, maybe not from our from who we are. How many of us need to just veg? Need to just decompress. And maybe you find 30 minutes or three hours in front of the TV. Or you pull out your phone or your iPad and you just lose yourself in a mindless game.

It’s been a struggle of mine in the past. I was I grew up as computers were beginning. Didn’t have a Commodore 64, but the next generation, that was me. I had these cool games that were DOS based. Which Scott left and no one else. But so I grew up with the technology. I had typing classes. It’s been a part of my life through high school and college, and then as the digital revolution has kicked in and the iPhone came around. We have all of these things that can take our time. If you want to see how much time it can take, follow my five-year-old. If you will allow him to hold this or anything like it, done.

I think as adults, we far too often allow this to take our time. And there are times where we need to decompress. I’m one of those guys where I get so wound up if I don’t decompress, you don’t want to be around. I pop. But when we talk about our heart and how we are supposed to mold our lives and ourselves so that our actions reflect our hearts. And we find ourselves sitting for 30, 45 minutes, lost in a useless game on your iPad. Or I’ll get home at night. What I do that ends up wasting a lot of time where I could be much more useful. I’ll get home, get the kids to bed. If Julianne set the bedtime it’d be 8 30 for everyone in the house.

I’m kind of a night owl. Like Bad and I share that. If I set the bedtime, it’d be midnight. And so I have this time, and it’s like I could be very useful with this time, and I find myself in front of the computer reading Fox News or an article, or I have one game that I play. I’ve limited myself to one. But I’ll sit in front of it for four or five hours, six hours, look at the clock, it’s two o’clock, and I’ve got to get up at six to go to work. Things like that just reflect poorly upon us. And I just confess it to all of y’all. But it starts to show in your life when I’m supposed to be at work at 7.30 and I turned off the alarm clock because I was up till 3.

And that’s not who we should be.

I would ask you to take and just note how much time you spend. So I was really knocking the iPad, or your phone, or your computer, or your TV. And just see how much time you might waste in a week. This is me preaching to the mirror because we had to get rid of cable. Well, we have made the conscious choice to get rid of cable. I loved having it because I love to have it. And I would get home before the boys were born, I would get home, and I would take a shower and click on fame in the TV. And it would be on until I got in bed. Or I would fall asleep watching TV. At what point is that taking our time and influencing us in a way that it should?

There’s plenty of perfectly wholesome stuff out there, you know, History Channel, ESPN, Weather Channel, get beyond that, I don’t know. I don’t really know what’s out there much anymore if it’s not on Netflix. But you can be doing nothing wrong and be doing something wrong. You can spend your time doing something that is in and of itself perfectly fine. But it’s taking you away from doing something you should be doing. Or better yet, something you could be doing. Read the Bible that if you know of something good to do, or something that you should be doing, and you’re not doing it, that can be a sin.

Think about that when in relation to your heart. And how we mold our hearts, and how people see us, because out of our heart comes everything we do from Proverbs. At what point is sitting in front of the TV and mindlessly watching five episodes of pick your show being useful, or a reflection of a Christ-like heart. Just something to think about. So I told you we were getting on to better things, and then I just scratched that. The loving heart that is described in Deuteronomy is a lifestyle. And it should be reflected, or it should be noticed by people. It should be noticed by my children. Hopefully it’s noticed by people that I see not just here, but hopefully I see some of y’all on some other day than Sunday and Wednesday.

Because y’all help me to guard my heart and to mold my heart in the way it should be going. It should be a reflection to the people we work with. If you work with people and you’ve worked with them for a given period of time and they don’t know that you’re a Christian by your actions, something’s wrong. And beyond that time, if they don’t know you’re a Christian because you’ve told them, something’s wrong. All these things come out of our heart. This is what I’m going to take the heart, we’re going to go into the take heart, which is a totally separate concept from here. But what I just said, if you work with someone and they don’t know you’re a Christian, they should. If you haven’t told them, well, you should.

Take courage. We lack that in American society today. We’ve become soft. Stand up for it. You believe it, right? You have that faithful heart? Try it. The more you do it, the better you’ll be at it. And the better you’ll feel about yourself, and the more you’ll be able to influence people. All it takes is telling somebody, you don’t have to beat them over the head with it, I’m a Christian, you should be coming to church. We’re going to heaven, you’re not. Yeah. It’s a total wrong way to do it. But if you bring it up and they know, you might notice their actions changing around you. The way they talk to you may change. When the time comes that they have a question, you want to be the one they come to.

Because they know that you’re going to give sound advice because of your background. Let’s turn over to 1 Timothy chapter 1 and verse 5.

This will be our last verse this evening. So Paul writes to Timothy here, and he’s beginning his first letter. And he gives this big overarching statement about what our aim is or what our target is. So when you draw a bow or you aim a rifle, this is what I want to do. This is where I want it to go. So let’s look at verse 5. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. That’s his goal. Paul tells Timothy, this is where you should be going. It should be love that comes from a pure heart and a sincere faith. If Paul tells that to Timothy, who is a young and up and coming preacher, if you will, I think it correlates well to every one of us.

Our aim should be to show love.

Our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. We talked about molding the heart. The conscience I had in my definition of the heart. That’s what controls your actions. Do you want to know an easy way to know where your heart is? The knee-jerk reaction. You hit your thumb with the hammer. What’s the first word you say? Someone comes to you and they say something that makes you just really angry. Are you slow to anger? Do you pop? Come right back at them.

When we’re able to control ourselves and exhibit that self-control, that’s when we know that we’re starting to get our heart where it should be.

That is Paul as he tells Timothy. Is love from a pure heart, with a good conscience and a sincere faith. You can take your songbook out if you’d like. Number 270 will be our song.

Conclusion

So what does God want? At the time where this was written in Romans 9 and 10. Confess with your mouth that Jesus is the Son of God. That’s the Colosseum. It’s I use this to print thank you notes, so it’s it’s washed out pretty good. But this is where the letter was written. This was built in 188 AD. So it turned out to be the place where Christians seem to die. If you did what Romans said, and you confess that Jesus was the Christ, you’d end up there.

But they still didn’t. This is what God wants. Pretty simple. He wants you to love him with all your heart and with all your soul. And with all your strength. And with all your mind. What’s it take to get there? A lot of us have already started down the path of Christianity, and we know that sometimes it’s difficult to stay on the path. Some of us haven’t started. We stand at the starting line. Heavens right back there. I can’t start the race. I know Jesus, his Lord. He did come and live a sinless life. He did die for my sins. He was raised. And he sits at God’s right hand. And he has this power to save you. All you have to do is step up and take it.

For those of us who are Christians, we understand that power. When you came up out of the water, I told you I knew where my heart was. That feeling. Nothing like it in the world. It eclipses when Elijah was born.

That feeling will pale in comparison to heaven.

I firmly believe our heart will go with us to heaven. We will know who we are when we get to heaven. We have opportunities. We have opportunities to show our love for the Lord that comes from our heart to show that we love him with all of our mind and all of our strength, that we’re going to put away the old man and that we want to walk down the path. There are people here who had started on that path I said it’s not easy. I’ve fallen off the path some of the people in this room have helped me stay on the path. Heaven is our goal. I would ask that you make heaven your goal. If you’re a Christian and you need to rededicate your life to Christ now’s the time.

If you’re not a Christian and you know that if you died today you wouldn’t go to heaven’s right there. God’s power is ready to save you and to cleanse you from your sins. If there is anything we can do for anyone tonight, please come forward as we stand this night