Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

Again let us start out by looking at Proverbs chapter 4. Since our last visit when we started to do a study on the heart of the believer and I was sharing this with a friend of mine in the Detroit area. And he is an older gentleman and he just had his 90th birthday, and he said to me, ” you know, never in my lifetime have I heard anyone teach or speak on the heart of the believer.” And I could hardly believe that. But it’s true, and what I am going to share will take several visits. I hope you don’t mind we do it that way, but it’s the only way we can. But I have really been a challenge, and I think is some ways I’ve seen things in scripture a little clearer once I started to focus on the heart of a believer. Do you remember last time that we said the heart itself found in the whole of the Bible is over 800 times and only two of these were referring to the physical heart and all the other references had to do with the inner-being of the believer; the inner life of the believer.

I was just reading the other day from someone who knows a great deal more that I do that apparently in the Hebrew text in the Old Testament the Hebrew word for the heart is found 817 times. And if you add to that the Greek word in the New Testament and that occurs 174 times. And one of the things that Darlene and I have noticed as we did some research on the heart it is amazing how many times you run across it in your reading. In fact some of our hymns we sang Darlene pointed to word heart because it is in poetry and it is found so much in the scriptures so I would like to continue with some thoughts on guarding the heart but let us start by reading two verses. Our key verse is found in Proverbs 4:23. Where Solomon writes,

“Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”

And as I mentioned a few minutes ago I have seen this verse to be maybe one of those summary verses in the Bible that bring everything into perspective when it comes to Christian living even though it is found in the Old Testament. And there is one other verse from Jeremiah 17:9. We should know this verse very well, but I will try to explain the connection between the two in a couple of minutes. But in Jeremiah chapter seventeen God is taking the tribe of Judah to account and he is talking about their attitude toward himself and he says in verse nine:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

We are going to come to that verse this morning because that is part of our problem as a Christian because we all still have a deviant heart even though God has given us a new heart, but we will talk about that a little bit this morning. I understand that during the late seventeen-hundreds and into the eighteen-hundreds there was another Queen Elizabeth’s reign in England and the British Commonwealth. And one of the great sea captains of that time was a man named Sir Walter Raleigh. And for some reason Queen Elizabeth was not terribly fond of Sir Walter Raleigh and eventually, and I am not sure what he did to infuriate her but she finally worked it around they would decapitate the man; they would execute him.

The story goes when they laid his head on the block the executioner had been kind of a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh so he was telling Sir Walter Raleigh how to lay his head on the chopping block so when the executioner came down with the sword it would make it just a little bit easier. And the historian said when the executioner was trying to give this instruction to Sir Walter Raleigh he looked up and he said, “it matters little friend, whether or not the head is right, so long as the heart is right.” Now that is partly true and partly false but I think we know what he is saying there and that he was talking about his own attitude as to what he knew in his head.

Now we often make the distinction between head and heart and what we mean is we make a distinction between our mind and our emotions which often times is really true. But the matter of the heart is really a very serious thing.

The other day I just ran across a book, I don’t know if you ever had this experience yourself that you are studying something or thinking about something, I found this often true I can stop off at someone’s house and I have this habit of looking at their library because I want to know what kind of books they read. And I will providentially run across a book exactly what I was looking for at the moment to help me with my thinking.

Well the other day I went into the Emmaus library and I was visiting with the librarian I was picking up a book on Genesis and I just walked through the door and I saw a stack of new books laying on the shelf there and I said, “John are there any new books coming out,” and he said ya, and I picked up some and one was named “Mining the Heart.” Now this book was written by a theologian and I said, “Can I take it back and see if I like it,” so I took it back to where I was studying and I open the book and started reading the context and I knew then it was one of those providential times that God was giving me a book that was really going to guide me some in my thinking. There were thousands of references in the book. So I jumped on Amazon.com and apparently the book was so new it wasn’t even selling on Amazon.com. So I went back to John and he said, “you want a copy?” And I said, “you bet I do.” So I wrote him out a check and took the book home and I am interested in going through this book because he approaches things from the theological point of view but he talks about the heart and give insight because he knows Hebrew and Greek very well. So you guys might pray for me as I start digging into this book that it will enlarge what I am trying to do. Maybe it will give me a better understanding.

Someone has said and I have just run across this quote recently, one person said, “any doctor will tell you the key to physical life is the heart, and if it is not beating you are dead.” The same is true of the spiritual life, the center of spiritual growth and transformation is the heart.

Remember before I said the first three references to the heart in the scriptures gives us a clue to the meaning of the word heart. Remember what we said in Genesis? In Genesis chapter, six let us just read this again because I just eventually want to get to talk about the depravity and desperateness of our heart. In Genesis chapter six which is the beginning of information on the flood. We don’t know how many years have gone by from the beginning of creation and the flood. It could have been literally hundreds of years or generations, but it tells us in verse five:

“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

And notice the word “thoughts” there because thoughts originate in the mind. When we read about the heart in the Bible it is referring to the mind or the intellect of man and in that same text we read on in verse six: “The Lord was sorry or in some translations, grieved that he had made man on the earth,” and it says in the latter part of the verse, “that he was grieved in his heart.” So grief is an emotion. We grieve we feel sad, we feel joy. All these things are the outworking of the emotional part of our makeup, so it includes the mind and our emotions.

And the last reference or third reference is found in Genesis chapter eight and I believe it is verse twenty-one. Now Noah had built an altar to the Lord and it says:

“And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.”

Now when the text said, “He said in his heart,” He determined in his heart; that is making a decision. Now God is eternal but we have to think about this in time because you and I make decisions. Don’t we? We do this as we make our way through life. So the word “heart” is referring to the Mind, the Emotions, and to the Will. And when you are reading through your Bible and you come across that word “heart,” kinda look in the context and sometimes it is really easy to see and other times it is not quite so easy to see but if you look in the context you will be able to tell whether the writer has the emotional factor of man’s being in mind; whether he has the mind or if he has the will of man; the decision making process of man.

Now that leads to kind of an interesting thought because when I read it in a Lexicon or I look in a Bible Dictionary it will say the heart is the center of man’s being or the place of his intellect or the seed of his intellect, emotion, and will. But that confuses me because it is not a place, it is part of our makeup.

Remember in Genesis 2:7, Moses recorded; let’s just read the verse:

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

After reading this verse I could start seeing the difference between the soul and the spirit in a way I never did before and the light on this came from this verse. Now some translations have, “became a living being.” but the Hebrew is “living soul.” Now this verse tells us several things. That man is made up of two parts. He is made up of material and spiritual parts. And the writer, Moses tells us here and that is when God formed man out of the dust of the earth then he breathed into him the breath of life. And he gave us life and this is the fact of our being and if we have no spirit we have no life. Now when you read that verse it helps you to see how it uses the word soul. Sometimes theologians try to divide man up into body, soul and spirit and sometimes that’s a little bit misleading because this text tells us when we think of man’s immaterial and material parts all of that is included in the word soul, so we could use the word “person” in place of the word “soul.”

Now if you can imagine this. Imagine I have drawn three figures of men up on a blackboard. On one figure, there is nothing inside. We will call this the Body. But there is a second man and inside we will put some wavy lines. And we will call this the spirit of man. And then we are going to have a third man with the waves inside but we are going to add a heart. Because it is the life that is the animating force of man. And it is the life that involves our personalities; our basic makeup, but in that makeup of man and in the life itself is the heart. And it’s the heart that God is primarily interested in life. So I talked to Joe and his wife and we have had a little communication in regards to revival. And I think it was last year that I shared with you from the book of Hebrews and the second generation Christian, so I have been puzzled about speaking about this and it dawned on me when looking through some of these texts that if you come down to it the root problem of every difficulty we have in the Christian life whether it is apathy; whether it is a lack of interest; or if we are getting sick spiritually all of that is a heart problem. And if God is primarily interested in our hearts then that tells us then the condition of our hearts will be reflected in the way we live and the way we talk and the way we function as Christians.

Now as you know in the physical heart there can be different contributing problems and if those problems aren’t dealt with it will eventually lead to heart failure. For example, high blood pressure can affect your heart. Diabetes can affect your heart. But in the end those malfunctions in the parts of the human body; the parts that don’t function well will affect the heart and eventually it will lead to heart failure and cardiac arrest.

So when it comes to spiritual things and God is looking at the heart the heart is going to reflect where we are spiritual. It’s going to determine how close we are to the Lord, it’s going to determine how much spiritual interest I have, it’s going to affect everything. So I come to the conclusion if we want revival among ourselves as Christians, and to me a revival is nothing more and nothing less than the way God says in the Bible the way he wants us to live. So in the end it is the condition of the heart to determine where we are at. Now we are all here this morning and we all have a certain amount of interest and we’re all at different levels in our spiritual growth and all that is going to reflect the condition of our heart.

Now we have to delve into this a little more. Now let me remind you real quick that illustration I tried to use in part one, remember those three reservoirs, where we were looking at a mountain stream running into three tanks. There was a spring a water at the top the water is coming out of the spring running down the hill going into the first tank which represents the mind, and from there it runs through a pipe into a second reservoir which represents the emotions, and then runs through another pipe into the third which represents the will. So you can see the mind, the emotion, and the will eventually intermingle and will come out the end of the third reservoir. Now the key to the purity of the water depends on the purity of the spring that’s given water at the top. So if the water at the top is impure so the water that comes out at the bottom is going to be impure. And in the same way if the mind of the believer is not functioning according to the Word of God then it is going to affect our emotions and it will affect our decision making and that can be illustrated in many differing ways. But you can see why Solomon tells us to guard the heart because that’s the part of man that God is concerned about.

Now if you read through the Old Testament you will find different references to the kind of heart that God is looking for. He is looking for faithful hearts, he’s looking for a loyal hearts and so forth and so on. I think I discovered five references in the Old Testament to the kind of heart that God is looking for. So in the end brothers and sisters it is the heart’s condition, and there is a way, but we will not get to it in our study today, and I have come to the conclusion the way you can keep the heart right be intimately involved with our knowledge and the use of the scriptures, and we will come to that eventually. So that means in some cases if a believer is very weak in his Bible reading and particularly in meditation; because in meditation we read the Bible not so much that we want to gain a theological knowledge, although I think that’s good, and knowledge is a good thing and we don’t want to diminish knowledge but in the end you know but God wants us to live according to the heart and that’s why in some countries you have believers who have very little knowledge and yet there is something very real to them in their life and worship. The reason is because they have a warm heart towards God. So we can have a lot of knowledge but still have a cold heart.

Now our problem as believers is when we get saved we have a very radical conversion because God gives us new life; a new heart but at the same time we still have the remains of the seed of our old heart; that deviant part. So what we need to look at for a few minutes is the matter of the heart how it was corrupted. Now keep in mind we are talking about the Mind, the Emotion, and the Will. Now if I could just backtrack and mention we made a distinction last time between inclination; a person’s inclination and their decision-making process. Inclination has to do with the “bent” as an adjective “intent on,” or as the disposition we have toward something. Now there is kind of a genetic disposition where I may be inclined to like the same things that my parents liked. Not always but sometimes I can. Let me give you an example. My dad had this thought about the styles of cars; the body shape of the car. Have you seen these Kia cars that look like a box? I think they are called Soul. I don’t know about you but every time I see someone driving one I look in and they look strange too. There is something about those cars…(I agree with Charlie on this one, and so does my wife.) Now let’s suppose Dave and I both need a new car so we go to a place where they sell used cars and I want a car that’s kinda sleek looking like a Chevy Impala or any sleek car and I am really impressed with the style. But Dave goes off and looks at a Kia. This is only a make believe story. The point being this is an inclination, something that comes naturally. This can be the case with clothing. All of you women have some kind of clothing you like to wear. Some men do too, but some look like they could use a little help with the kind of close they were, but we all have an inclination. Now here is another example: when I got out of Bible school some time ago I found my first pair of Florsheim shoes. Guess what kind of shoes I wore for the past fifty years? I really like them and that is a natural inclination.

Now the other kind of disposition or inclination is evil. And this came about in man’s heart because of the fall and it got corrupted. So that why I read from chapter seventeen of Genesis to see what God’s perspective of man heart is. So when it says that it is desperately sick it’s referring to the Mind, Emotion, and Will, because an unsaved person’s mind, emotion and will; his heart is inclined toward that which is evil.

Now when God created Adam and Eve they were created perfect so that means they had a pure mind they had pure emotions and their decision making; whatever decisions they had to make they were all pure. But at the time of the fall when Adam took the fruit from Eve and ate it then they and the whole human race were plunged into sin and processed this evil disposition. Now sometimes we talk about that evil disposition as the diabolical nature of man. So people call it the sin nature. If you read theological books that’s the term they use.

Now I think there is a word better than those words. If you are like me when someone says the nature of men, It just seems to not compute in my mind so well. But if you tell me the sin nature is an evil disposition or evil inclination and you can too. Before we were saved our minds our emotions and our wills; our hearts was always inclined to that which is evil.

They had on Bill O’Reilly the other night an atheist and Bill O’Reilly said to him, “Why do you guys always pick on Christmas, why don’t you just take a few days off and quit bashing Christmas all the time.” He was taken the side of O’Reilly, but the inclination of his heart was I don’t believe there is a God. And he said I have the right to say things about God if I believe he doesn’t exist. This always puzzled me, why do these guys always talk about God if he doesn’t exist? Isn’t that funny, because I wouldn’t want to talk about something that didn’t exist.

So at the fall men received this evil disposition and if you read through the New Testament especially you can see where that corruption manifested itself in the mind, the emotions, and the will. Now let me let the Bible speak for itself and let us notice this for a moment. Remember I mentioned earlier the water that comes out of the spring; where we talk about pure and polluted water. Someone put it this way is little different terms. What a being is in the essences of his nature determines what kind of thoughts, what sort of emotions and what type of decisions he will make. So what he is saying, “The condition of the heart of man where he has good thoughts or bad thoughts, or good emotions or evil emotions or whether he makes good decisions or bad decisions. Let us allow the scripture to show us man’s heart was corrupted at the fall.

Let’s take the mind first. In Romans 8:7, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” Notice Paul in the context is dealing with two kinds of people; a believer and a non-believer. What he is saying that the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God for it does not submit itself to the law of God, and it does not even have the capability to do so. That reminds me of Genesis 6:5, where God saw the thoughts of man were only evil continually.

In Romans 1:21, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God…” Many believe this goes back to the pre-flood days; “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (In some translations it says, “They became futile in their speculations and their hearts were darkened…”). So the darkened heart is always going to have evil inclinations and dispositions.

Think of this scripture in Titus 1:15, “To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure…” But then he tells us why, “but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.” So at the fall of man that part that is called the mind it has become darkened, it has become futile, it lacks spiritual understanding.

And then man’s emotions, and we will be looking at Ephesians 4, and this is one of the clearest passages in the New Testament on emotions, and when we are talking about emotions we are talking about evil emotions, like hate, bitterness, resentment all those kind of things that begin in the mind and if the mind is impure then the emotions are not going to be pure neither. And if the mind has a mindset of hatred and that is going to work out to that person’s emotions. So if the mind has a negative impression of another person it will reflect itself as anger or resentment. Now in Ephesians chapter 4 Paul is describing the pre-conversion life of the Ephesians Christians. He says in verse 17,

“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.”

And then he goes on to say, in the next two verses,

“They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.”

Or greediness. Now the two words in my translation become callous as referring to the emotional part of the heart.

Now you can see that something that begins as resentment, and if we hang on to that resentment over a period of time we will become callous. Right! And that was because the mind was corrupted at the fall.

Now the third part of man’s heart; the will is illustrated in a couple of verses in scripture. For example Ephesians 4 in another translation we read these words, “who being past feeling; the same as being callous, given themselves over unto lasciviousness and greediness.” And man’s will has been corrupted and his choices and decisions have followed his mind.

Now think about this in relationship to Cain and Abel. John tells us the reason Cain killed Abel because his life was more righteous than Cain’s life. The word there for slew in the Hebrew means “the slitting of the throat.” And many scholars think that that is the way Cain killed Abel. He took a knife and slit his throat, and, of course, that would have resulted in immediate death. Now if you read that verse in light of what we are talking about and if he was looking at Able and he saw Abel’s life was more righteous than his in his mind he resented him. And when he allowed that resentment to grow it eventually ended up in murder because the emotions always follow the mind or thought life. And if the mind is impure the emotions will be impure and the decisions we make will be impure and we could use a lot of examples to show that in life itself. Now eventually we are going to talk about “how to guard our hearts (our minds, our emotions and our will).”

Let me remind you that the moment we got saved that God gave us all the provisions we need in order to have a pure heart. And that does not mean we become perfect but we can have a pure hearts and let me illustrate this for you. The mind can be purified. Now all believers have experienced this. Now before I was saved; and maybe some of you guys experienced this. Before I was saved I cursed like a drunken sailor. Right now I am hanging out with the police in my hometown, (I am their Chaplain and I do ridealongs), and I hear some bad language, and I kinda forgot the language that characterized me before I was saved but you know it’s an amazing thing when we get saved and God gives us a new heart we sometimes do not even think about those words anymore. God seem to purify our language and language comes from the mind so he purifies the way we talk and he purifies the mind itself.

There are probably other ways we could talk about anger, I use to have a terrible anger problem before I was saved, and this might not be true with everyone, but when we get saved we have some things in our lives that God needs to work on to get them out of our lives but it was the strangest thing with me that after I got saved I never lost my temper like I did before. Now that tells me that God made a provision right after I got saved that the mind can be purified and with the mind being purified the speech is going to be purified. One man said, “I never learned the king’s English until I got saved.” Because he so used to using all kinds of foul talk.

Author’s Note:

(With me the sin was drinking. But God took the desire completely away from me. My wife had the same problem, but God allowed her to deal with it in a different way.)

Now the emotions can be purified as well. Bitterness and anger are two emotions. I have done some counseling over the years and I have found that as a root a lot of problems between spouses sometimes is either anger or bitterness over issues or personalities; the way the spouse lives or habits and those things can turn into very nasty problems in marriage. But when you and I get saved we are in a position where our emotions can be purified and we learn how to deal with bitterness and anger. So God can take the anger away. He can take the resentment away and it is all testimony to the fact that he can purify our emotions when we get saved.

And last of all it free the will that we can make good decisions. Martin Luther wrote this incredible book, and some people think this is the best book that he ever wrote and it is called, “The Bondage of the Will.” And all he was doing was to show that when you and I are unsaved we are enslaved and our wills will function in relationship to the sinful disposition that we have. But when we get saved God sets that will free and now we can choose to love him; we can choose to obey him. Now the verses that are clearer in the New Testament in my mind on setting our will free is found in Romans 6:12-14. Here they are:

“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.”

In verse 12 it is clear when it says, “do not let sin reign” or “let not,” it means we have the choice. So going on he says in verse 13 and 14 , “Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members of God as instruments for righteousness For sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.” So the will has been set free. So before we were saved we had a corrupt heart and God has given us a new heart with all of the capabilities and provisions that you and I can live a pattern of our lives can be that that of a pure heart.

Now let me outline real quick the five basic provisions God has made that you and I can have a pure heart. The first is:

1.) The Calling. That’s where sin was paid for and our wills were set free.

The Second great truth in the New Testament is:

2.) Our union with Christ. You know it is sometimes hard for us; even by faith to embrace this truth at the moment we were saved that we were organically united with Christ. That we have become part of the body and that means his life is my life. And that means the things that characterize him and by his spirit those trades he can manufacture or put into our lives. The fruit of the spirit is a good example. So the union with Christ is a vitally important truth. Now thirdly:

3.) He gave us a new disposition. Titus 3:5.

4.) He gives us the Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 1:22.

5.) And the Lord Jesus indwells in the believer. Galatians 2:20.

And those are the five provisions that God has made the moment we were saved that you and I can have a heart that pleases him.

You may have heard this story before of this little village where these people enjoyed this clean clear sparkling water. All the water in all the houses were really nice and clean. They had a pond in this village where everyone got their water from because the water was so clean in this pond. The reason the water was so clean was because of an old man who lived in the mountains. His job was to look after a spring of water that came out of the mountain. The water went into a well and that well supplied the water for the pond in the village. He would take out anything that was impure so that the water would always be clean. And then one day the city fathers thought, we are over budget so we will just let the old man go. So they fired him. And after some time the water slowly became more and more impure. And this led to people having problems with the water in their houses.

When I read that story I thought that was a good illustration of the Christian mind. What I am in my heart will determine my actions and my attitude toward other people. If the heart is pure and clean; remember in Psalm 51, David said, “create in me a …” what kind of heart, “a clean heart.” So God wants us to have a mind, emotion and a will to function according to his will and when it does we live a victorious Christian life. And may God help us to be concerned about our hearts. That is the most important thing because that is what we deal with in our lives and we must be concerned with it.