keep thy heart

Prov. 4:23 Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.
It's amazing how many people think that Jesus came to do away with that "old, broken law of the Old Testament", in order to implement a "new and better formula, called the New Testament". When Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. In Matthew 15:17-20 Jesus said something that went against everything the Jews had learned through tradition over the last several hundred years, this is what he said, "whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught[.] But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man."
Jesus here is not denying the fact that one of the ceremonial laws was to wash your hands before you ate, but the pharisees had turned it into something spiritual, something that was necessary for their salvation. What the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders were missing, was that the ceremonial law was always either a picture and type fulfilled in Christ, or something that was given to the Jews for their own benefit. The law about washing your hands never had anything to do with salvation or holy living, it was given as a sanitary issue that we still follow today. (Just look at the signs in any public restroom, "all employees must wash hands before returning to work.") Unfortunately, the Jews had taken the hand washing rule too seriously (By making it a spiritual law) and had completely ignored Prov. 4:23. Jesus wasn't giving them some new law, he was clarifying the old one that they had twisted up.
I don't know that on the day of judgment we'll give an account for how often we did or didn't wash our hands, but I think we will give an account for how clean we kept our heart. We live in a world much like the one that Jesus was dealing with, if you are caught returning to work without washing your hands you can lose your job. If your boss found out you were living an immoral life style and tried to fire you, he would probably get sued for discrimination. Now don't get me wrong, if you're going to be handling my food (or anything else for that matter) I hope you wash your hands before you leave the restroom; but I am even more concerned that your heart be clean. We provide our children with condoms and by doing so we shout to them the message that we care much more for their physical life than their spiritual one. When the government hands out sterile needles so that drug addicts can continue abusing themselves "safely", we tell them that so long as they live a few years longer, we care nothing if they burn for eternity in hell.
Oh, beloved in the Lord, stop bowing to the to the pressure of our sinful culture, stop "running to the same excess of riot" that they do. Gird up the loins of your prophet's mantle and love our country enough to tell them what they need to hear about eternity, instead of what they want to hear about today. When we stress the physical and neglect the spiritual, we are acting just like the Pharisees and proving that the truth is not in us.

God is greater than our heart

I John 3:20 For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. July 11, 2007
It seems as if the modern world we live in has completely forgotten that this verse is in the bible. The prevalent theme being pushed by Hollywood today is "follow your heart", and the modern Evangelists, for the most part, have latched onto it. After moderating the "conversion experience", the recipient will ask the evangelist "Now am I saved?" He replies "What does your heart tell you?"
Such an interaction teaches the convert that the status of his salvation depends on what his heart feels. Jeremiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" There comes a time in many believers lives when their highly deceitful heart tells them, "You can't be saved, you're not good enough." It is at that time that our confidence in the saving power of God coupled with his all sovereign, keeping power, takes over. The second part of what our heart told was correct, we're never good enough for salvation, however we can be saved if we remember I John 3:20 is still in the bible. We have a God who is greater than our hearts, and though the logic of our heart would seem to tell us we are headed for hell, our faith in a sovereign God overrides that.
When the greater part of Christendom begins rejecting or downplaying the sovereignty of God, it hurts all aspects of our life, but no one area is hit harder than the area of conversion. Because if we do not serve an all powerful God, what hope do we have for salvation? I know for a fact I'm not good enough to earn it, the bible tells me I'm not smart enough to choose it, and my heart isn't trustworthy enough to sustain it. My faith lies solely in the blood of Jesus Christ and the love and power of a God that saved me when I never did a thing to deserve it.
Last week we discussed the worth of a soul, and the fact that our souls are worth more than the entire world. If that is what God saved, what do you have to deserve God paying such a high price? Is baptism an act that merits salvation, does mere water have some sort of efficacy that makes it worth God's while? Is church membership worth more than all material gain on the globe, can we do any works that would pay for such a debt? Would God pay the price of His only begotten son dying on a cross, if it took our works to keep that salvation? Obviously the question to all the answers above is a resounding "NO"! Understanding the biblical doctrine of the sovereignty of God in conversion, leads us to an understanding of the fact that we belong to a God that is greater than even our heart. Such a God deserves our all, does he not? Our all will not save us, it will not repay the debt he payed for us, but it is a service we do anyways, out of love and worship for such a God as ours.

A time to cast away.

Ecc. 3:5 "A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;" June 20,2007

Every good farmer or gardener knows, that one of the first things you have to do when preparing land for agricultural use, is to remove all the stones. All those those hard pieces of rock that will inhibit many plants from growing or at least will keep them from reaching their full potential. It is a hard chore, it requires a lot of work and monotony, but in the end it is worth it, because of the fruit you reap from that ground. In many parts of the country where the ground is especially rocky, the farmers will take all these stones and build a stone wall around the fields.
This principle is true for a christian as well, we have a calling to remove the many "stones" and "rocks" from our hearts, so that God can better use us. Now a christian with "rocks" is still a christian, but if he has a heart with "stones" of sin scattered throughout, he will not be blessed with the work and fruit of a christian with a clean heart. Every christian's earnest desire ought to be that God would make them the purest and cleanest servant fit for the masters service. Sometimes that requires breaking some hard habits, sometimes that includes purifying yourself from ingrained practices, it can be a hard work and one that involves toil and sweat, but the end result will make it all worthwhile. Our call is to be like the master, to do what he would have us do, to be conformed to his image. We will never reach a state of sinlessness on this earth, even Paul struggled with doing the things he should, and not doing the things he shouldn't. That doesn't mean we throw in the towel though, it means we keep casting away those nasty rocks.
Now, we must remember that there is a time to gather these stone together as well, those rocks that at one time seemed so nasty to the farmer, he can use to build himself a guard wall. We too must keep in remembrance those sins that we are casting out, in order to make sure we don't repeat those sins. In essence we are taking the things we have rid our lives of, and using them for the glory of God, we keep the memory of these sins to keep us humble before God and remind us that no man is above sin, we all (but for the grace of God) could fall prey to those sins once again at any time. Sin is an addiction, and when a christian is able to rid himself of a particular sin he needs to keep himself as far away from it as possible, if you start dabbling around in it, it will take you captive again before you realize what happened to you. Then you will have to start the whole "casting away" process over again.
Let's all start being a little more concerned about our heart's purity, let's work to get any sins that we have out, and then let's stay as far away from those sins as we can. Why don't we let those sins become our "stone wall" that protects us from recommitting them.