proverbs: on guarding your heart… · 2015. 2. 12. ·...

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved.

Transcript August 2/3, 2014

Proverbs: On Guarding Your Heart Jake Barker | Proverbs 4

Alright, well what is up Traders Point? What is up party people in the place to be? I hope that you have had a great weekend so far. Especially if you are new or just getting to know us, we are incredibly glad you would spend your time here. We know that a lot of people move into this part of town over the summer. So if that is you, if you are new to the area, we would love to meet you. Like Dave said, stop by Connection Central on your way out. We would love to get to know you and answer any of your questions. That would be great. Hey over the summer we have been spending our time in the book of Proverbs. If you are not familiar with the Bible or especially the book of Proverbs, let me kind of give you some insight. It is a book that is in a series of books inside the Bible called Wisdom Literature. So it is all about wisdom and the best way of living a life worth living. No matter where you are on your faith journey, I know this about you. We are all trying to make sense of life, all of us. All of us want to live a life worth something, so we are trying to make sense of it all. We have all these pieces of our lives that are trying to go together. So I have my family over here in this box and my money is right here, and my career is right there, and my friends, over here. It is my job to take all those pieces and put them together to make a life worth living. The pieces are complicated in their own right and then I am supposed to put them together. This is not easy stuff. So all of us are grasping for wisdom or insight; some sort of knowledge that will make sense of all these pieces so we can live a life worth living. We believe that God has given us the wisdom that is necessary to live that life. Some of us treat God as if He is playing this cosmic game of hide-‐and-‐seek, like He has all the answers but He won’t tell us what they are. In reality, what has happened is that in the Bible He has revealed this wisdom. That is where we have been spending our time this summer. I am going to remind you of something we have said a couple of times over in this series. True wisdom is found in Jesus. There are a lot of different people, a lot of different sources in the world that are claiming to have wisdom that will help you live life. This is the secret. These are the top three steps to a healthy family, all these secret insights. But we believe true wisdom is found in Jesus. Here is the wisdom of Jesus. No longer is life about what we bring to God. No longer am I, in all my efforts trying to do enough good, say the right thing, be the right person, so that God will finally love me. I am not earning enough frequent flier miles so one day when I die I will fly to heaven. That is not the goal of life. Instead, it is not about what I bring to God, but what God has already given. So because of the grace of Jesus Christ, our lives are worth living. In fact the only life worth living is one that is a response to the grace of Jesus. So now my life is all been formed by what Jesus has done for me and that is the life worth living. If you have your Bible or a Bible app, I would love for you to join me in Proverbs 4. That is where we are going to be spending our time today. Proverbs 4 is actually pretty unique in the whole book of Proverbs. What you will find in these chapters is you will read them and they seem a little schizophrenic, like Bible A.D.D. or something. Where they are like talking about a bunch of different things. One of them will

Proverbs: On Guarding Your Heart August 2/3, 2014

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

have money, and marriage, and work all in the same chapter. But in Proverbs 4, it is actually one extended thought. That is where we are going to be living today is in Proverbs 4. Now you and I know that when you are teaching someone to do something, there is a necessary combination of positive instruction and negative instruction. When I am trying to teach you how to do something, a skill or something like that, I am going to include both positive instruction, which is what you should do, and then negative instruction, which is what you should not do. So say you were being taught how to bake a cake. You will be taught to crack the eggs and put the yolk in the batter, right? Do not put the egg shells in the batter. That would be bad. Then somebody will choke on them and they will die. That is what happens when you put an egg shell in a cake. I didn’t know if you knew that. Do this and then don’t do that. In the Bible there are all kinds of instruction, but what I have seen is that it has earned this unfounded reputation that the Bible is full of negative instruction. The Bible is all about no don’t , no way Jose, no soup for you. There are a bunch of no’s. No, no, no, no fun, no life, no nothing. That is what the Bible has the reputation for. What we are going to find today is that Proverbs 4 is actually a bunch of positive instruction saying, “Here is the life worth living. This is the path worth following.” So what you and I have here is a bunch of people in this room who are trying to figure out life, and in Proverbs 4 we have God very clearly laying out the path worth following. This just seems like a match made in heaven. I want to know, God is giving me the answer. This is fantastic. What we are going to find in Proverbs 4 is that none of us and going to walk away unchallenged. There is something, not matter how long you have been doing this thing, there is some kind of challenge for all of us. That is kind of the way the Bible works. So buckle up and here we go with Proverbs 4. The chapter is actually broken up into three big pieces. We are just going to take it one piece at a time, read it all at once, and then talk about what it means, very simple. Proverbs 4:1-‐9, let us begin. “Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight, for I give you good precepts; do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender, the only one in the sight of my mother, he taught me and said to me, ‘Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments, and live. Get wisdom; get insight; do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you. The beginning of wisdom is this; Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight. Prize her highly, and she will exalt you; she will honor you if you embrace her. She will place on your head a graceful garland; she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.’” So let’s just kind of take our time and understand what we are reading here. What we have on our hands is a dad sitting down a son and saying, “Son, here is what is important.” A dad is just kind of sitting him down and here is the talk. Here are the keys to a life worth living. In fact he says, “Remember your grandfather? Remember the old guy, right? He told me this when I was young, so now I am telling you this.” So what we have here, this generational tradition of passing down wisdom from one generation to the next. So the dad is talking to the son and saying, “Here is what you need to know.” Now I am a dad and I have one son right now. In about five weeks, I’ll have another. So I am going to have two sons. As a dad, one of my main responsibilities is to teach them the life with living. That is my job, I am going to teach them some things. So there are things in my life that I need to teach them which are really, really important, like foundations. Some others are may be a little smaller lessons, but I still am obligated as a dad to tell you these things.



Some of the things that I want them to know, as their dad, is I want them to prefer Coke over Pepsi. That is just important to me. Their mom keeps buying Pepsi and I wish she would just buy Coke. So I hope when we outnumber her, I can finally get what I want. That is kind of the game plan there. I need them to know that steak is best eaten a little pink in the middle. Extra-‐crispy is for your chicken, not your steak. That is kind of the way that works. Then I need them to passionately love Kentucky basketball like I do, because if they don’t love the same sports teams that I love, I can’t guarantee they will have a place to sleep at night! That is just how I roll. There are some things I just need them to know. There are some really important things I need them to know as well that I am going to take a little more seriously. I feel it is my job as a dad, my job as a parent, one of my primary and in fact, the primary responsibility I have as a parent is to tell them about Jesus, who He is and what it means. It is my job. I will care about their GPA and I will care about their clean room, and I will care about all that stuff, but primarily, my main responsibility as a father is to tell them and model for them who Jesus is. That is super important to me. I want my sons to be generous men when they grow up. I am not raising them to be good kids, I am raising them to be men. I want them to be men with generosity who are open-‐handed with their resources. I also feel as a dad one of my main jobs is to show them how to honor and treat the women in their life, between their mother and their sister and the women they will interact with. That is my job as a dad. There are going to be moments throughout their childhood that I am going to sit them down and say, “Here is what you need to know, here is how it is modeled in my life, here is what my dad taught me, and most of all here is what your heavenly Father says in the Bible.” So I am going to give them that stuff. So what we have here is a dad sitting down his son and saying, “These are the important things. This is really what matters.” If you look in verse 5, he says something twice in a few verses. He says, “Son, get wisdom and get insight.” He says that a couple of times. “Get wisdom and get insight. That is really what matters.” Now notice what the dad said. He doesn’t sit down his son and look him in the eye and say, “You know, son, here is what really, really matters. Get paid. Just get paid. It is all about the Benjamins. Just stack them up. I don’t care what it takes. Make money, that is what matters.” No he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t sit him down and say, “Okay son, here is the key. Get a hot chick. Get a hotty. I don’t care if her IQ is a negative ten, it doesn’t matter. Get a hotty.” No, he doesn’t say that either. He says, “Get wisdom and get insight, that is really what matters.” Now why would a dad need to sit down his son and say, “Get wisdom?” Why would he do that? Well the majority of our teaching, when we are imparting it to other people, is we are teaching them things that are not self-‐evident. We have to teach them because they may not come to that conclusion on their own. So this dad is looking at his son and saying, “I know there are a myriad of competitors for your attention in life and I need you to know that wisdom and insight are the most important things. There are all kinds of things that are going to pull you in all kinds of direction, and wisdom and insight are the ones that are worth it.” Now what are the enemies to wisdom in our world? Personally, I think one of the biggest ones is that the speed of life can often be an enemy of wisdom. In fact, urgency is often the enemy of wisdom. You and I live at a fast-‐paced, breakneck speed. Our culture is always on to the next thing, even before the first thing is done. So even before I have my phone, they are ready for an upgrade. As soon as I get my computer, it is already crashing. That is kind of the way it works. So we are always onto the next latest,



greatest, and, “if you don’t have what I have, you are not as cool as I am.” We are always trying to keep up. Let me ask you this. When you think about the wisest people in your life, are they older or are they younger? They are usually older. Are they experienced or inexperienced? Usually they have lived life for a while, been around the block. They have some war wounds from which they have learned lessons. Think about the best decision you ever made in your entire life. Was it the one you made in a split second, on the fly, without really thinking about it? Or was it one that you took your time, you prayed over it, and you got counsel. See wisdom takes time and time is the very thing we don’t seem to have. So because I want to keep up and because I am addicted to this activity, I don’t take the time that is necessary for wisdom. So, this dad is talking to his young son and saying, “Son, you have the rest of your life ahead of you. There will be all kinds of competitors for your attention and for your activity, and for your energy, and I want you to understand you need to get wisdom.” He is going to go on and tell us he wants us to get Godly wisdom, because this other version, the world’s wisdom, that is just not working. Can we all maybe agree collectively that the world’s wisdom is just not working? If you are like, okay, great, fine. So like, what if we all agreed today that we are done with the world’s wisdom and we are going to this God thing. Because the world’s wisdom, if you thought about the picture of success, what would it look like? It says, “Be young. Be tan. Be rich. Be on the cover of a tabloid and be trending onto whatever.” That is kind of the goal, that is the picture of success. But if you think about the people who have all those five, do they seem happy? Do they seem content? Does that seem satisfying to anyone who actually has it? Isn’t it possible that the commercials we are seeing, the message we are being sold, is just broken? So this father is saying there is a different type of wisdom, God’s wisdom, and it is the one worth getting. Whatever you get, get that. So what does that wisdom look like? Say yeah I am in, what does it even look like? Well, I am glad you asked because that is what he is about to explain here in verse 10. Let’s read together in verses 10-‐19. “Hear, my son, and accept my words, that the years of your life may be many. I have taught you the way of wisdom; I have led you in the paths of uprightness. When you walk, your step will not be hampered, and if you run, you will not stumble. Keep hold of the instruction; do not let go; guard her, for she is your life. Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on. For they cannot sleep unless they have done wrong; they are robbed of sleep unless they have made someone stumble. For they eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence. But the path of the righteous is like the light of down, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” So the father is looking at his son and he is saying, “This is the way that life works. This is the life worth living.” What he presents to us is he says, “There are two paths to life. Two. The first one is the way of light, it is the one that will honor God, it is the one you will be able to see clearly steps in front of you. That is one path. Path number two is the path of destruction, is the one that loves sin, is the one that loves darkness and it leads to nothing good. There are two choices. You will choose one of them.” And he is asking him to choose wisely. If you are familiar at all with the words of Jesus, He presented the same conundrum for us, the same choice for us, in a different language. Here is how He puts it in Matthew 7. Jesus said, “Enter by the



narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life and those who find it are few.” So between the words of this father in Proverbs and the words of Jesus, it appears that all of us stand at a fork in the road, all of us, and there are two different paths in front of us. We will choose one of them, but it is up to us to choose. Now you and I, when we hear some of these either-‐or choices, we bristle a little bit. Like, I don’t want to have to choose. I have been taught not to settle for either-‐or. I want to get both-‐and. I am an American, how dare you make me choose. Options are my thing. We like options. Last week I was at one of those restaurants that have those new dispensers, like the silver, jetsons-‐looking thing for their drinks. It has like an ipad on there and you have to choose, because that is what we need. Right? My kids will never know the pain of only having six choices. They are going to have hundreds and hundreds of options. So I walk up and I end up behind this guy who is pry 13. I have my water, not because I am healthy, but because I am cheap. I am ready to drink my water and I got the thimble they give you for when you want water. They just give you the little tiny thing. So I am waiting and I am thirsty and I need my water. I am going to wait patiently because I work at a church, and you guys know that. So I don’t want to end up in the newspaper – Pastor punches kid for water. I can’t have that in my life. So I am waiting and this guy is going through the deal. So he gets up there and he has his cup. He first chooses sprite and he gets sprite but he only fills it a third of the way. Then he wants something else, I guess. So he backs out of the menu, because that is the thing. Then the second choice he chooses is cherry coke on top of the sprite. I just want water. So I am just thirsty. I am watching him do this but he only gets like another third. He backs out, backs out, backs out. Then he chooses orange fanta on top of it. I am just thinking, “I just want to talk about your life decisions. I am worried about your sincerely because you know that is gross and I don’t know why.” All I want is my water. That is all I want. All this guy was doing is he was taking full advantage of the tons of options in front of him. You’ve got all these options, why not mix it up a little bit? Why not the sprite, cherry coke, fanta orange business, right? Why not go for that? You and I when it comes to our soda choices, then when it comes to our life, we are not really into either-‐or. We kind of want to mix it up a little bit. So how dare you put me at this fork in the road where you are making me choose between the path of the righteous and the path of the wicked? I want some both. In fact, what if we just did a 60-‐40 split? For 60% of my life I am on the path of righteousness, but for 40% I am on the patch of the wicked. What if I did weekdays on the path of righteousness and weekends on the path of the wicked? I want a hybrid. I don’t want to have to choose. Yeah, I know the right answer but that other path looks like a lot of fun, so let me have some of both. And it is in our pursuit of that third option that doesn’t actually exist, that we end up in those “how did I get here” moments. Have you ever had one of those? All of the sudden there is like this moment of clarity and you wake up and realize what your life has become, and you ask yourself the question, “How did I get here? This is not where I thought I was going to be. I thought I would go just a little bit down that road, I didn’t know I was going all the way. How did I end up around these people? How did I become this person? How did I get here? It was in my effort to have a little bit of both, that all of the sudden when I dipped my toe in the shallow end, I found myself in the deep end and I am just engulfed.



So none of us will wake up one day and decide, “You know what? I am just going to be a jerk. That is my thing. I am just going to be a jerk. I am going to be the guy who is negative and everybody avoids in the hallways.” No, none of us decided that. What happened was, it began with this ounce of cynicism towards our boss or our parents, and we didn’t address it and it grew, and it grew until it took over and it became who we were. No one decides they want to end up in a web of lies. No one wants that. It started out with one of those seemingly white ones that allowed us to avoid a hard conversation. It allowed us to avoid some of the consequences of our actions. But I had to tell number two to cover up the number one, and the number three to cover up for number two. Now I just had one of those moments where I am not sure who I told what to anymore. I can’t keep it straight. No one decides to get hooked on pornography. They don’t make that decision. It just starts in the checkout at the grocery store and makes its way to our iphone, and now it dominates our internet history. No one wants to be addicted to painkillers or alcohol or a narcotic. No one wants to. No one means to do that. What started out as a taste, what started out as this one time thing, has now become this lifestyle where we can’t break that cycle. This is the sneaky way sin works in our life. Sin begins as curiosity, but ends with slavery. Sin begins as curiosity, but ends with slavery. It started out as this one time deal, it was going to be this one off. I am in control, I can quit when I want. Then before you knew it, you couldn’t control anything. It became impulsive. Every time that I open up that internet browser, I go to that website. Every time that I have a bad day, I open that bottle. Every time I am with that person, I spread that rumor. It’s like I can’t help it anymore. It has become who I am. What started as a curious thing, what started as this one time experiment, now became who we are. Before you react too harshly to that word slavery, come on man. That is kind of a thing in my life, but I am not controlled by it. I can quit when I want. Just know they are not my words, they are from Jesus. Jesus was talking to His disciples in John 8. He told them, His buddies that He was hanging out with, He said, “I came to free you from slavery.” They looked at each other like, “Jesus, I am a tax collector and he is a fisherman. We are not slaves. I don’t know what your problem is.” And He said, “No, no, no, we are not talking about your profession. We are talking about your spirituality. You are slaves.” Here is how Jesus put it in John 8:34. “Jesus answered them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” So Jesus is proposing to His disciples, proposing to you and I, that sin is not this one-‐time thing. It is not this mistake that we made that may never happen again. It is slavery, ownership, the cycle that you and I cannot break on our own. If you walked into this room and you know this is you, as I am describing that you are like, “Yeah, that is all me. You described my yesterday, you described my last week for me. I want to stop, but I can’t. I don’t know how to break this.” I just want to take you back to John 8:34. He says, “Jesus is the liberator. Jesus is the abolitionist who breaks the bondage of our chains. Jesus is the freedom that we all seek.” It is not about what I am bringing to God to make Him love me more, it is only about Jesus giving us that freedom He has given us, that forgiveness. We don’t want you leaving here without saying something. We don’t want you suffering alone. We don’t want you doing this by yourself. Allow us to pray with you, allow us to talk you through us, but Jesus is



the freedom that we so desperately seek. It simply requires that admission that, “I can’t do it on my own.” So the father is looking at the son, and he is saying, “The most important thing you can do is to get wisdom and get insight.” Wisdom looks like you making the right choice at that fork in the road. Choose the path of righteousness. But it is not just a one-‐time decision, it is not just a decision I made when I was 12 and now it lasts me for a lifetime. It is going to be a constant battle. So how do I stay on that path of righteousness? That is how the father ends chapter 4 if you will finish with me. It begins in verse 20. He says, “My son, be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. For they are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. Put away from your 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; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.” So the father is outlining here is how you stay on the path. Here is how you stay on the path of righteousness. He is further illuminating the difference between God’s wisdom and the world’s wisdom. See the world’s wisdom says this, self-‐help basically says, “if I can change my circumstances on the outside, then I will feel better inside.” That is kind of the game plan. If I can change some things outside of me, whether it is my behaviors, my circumstances, I will feel better inside. Like this is every commercial you have ever seen in your life, right? Have this thing and you will feel better inside. This dish soap will change your world. You will be happier if you use Dawn. Like that is kind of the whole selling plan. Or if you stop hanging out with those people, then you will be happy. Or if you buy this thing, if you get that promotion, if all the sudden your outside circumstance changes, then you will feel better inside. God is trying to get our attention and say, “Actually, it is the exact opposite.” You see where the world works from the outside in, God works from the inside out. Here is how Jesus puts it in Luke 6:45. He says, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” So what Jesus is saying, He is saying, “I know that the world is selling you this outside-‐in attack, I am actually going to go from the inside out.” Simply put, what Jesus just said is that everything on the outside came from within. Everything on the outside of me; my behavior, my values, my relationships, my attitude, my speech, all of that outside of me came from within me. So I would love to blame my circumstance for my behavior, but really my behavior originated within my heart. So everything that is on the outside came from within. So my road rage, when I get cutoff in traffic, that is not a product of my circumstance, that is in my heart. My stereotypes about people that have a different color skin than me, that is not a product of a circumstance, that is the evidence of my heart. When I fly off the handle and get mad at my loved ones, that is not their fault. That is within me. So Jesus is saying the reason that good person is good is that it is from within. The reason the evil person is evil is because of what is within. So He wants to get inside and rearrange our heart. My wife and I, we read this book together a few years ago, and it had the same premise; everything on the outside came



from within. As we were reading this and understanding the truth of scripture together, I realized this was the worst possible book for me to be reading with my wife. All of the sudden I had to actually own my behavior in front of her. I had this previous go-‐to excuse that when I would say something dumb and hurt her feelings I would say, “Oh, I didn’t mean that, I don’t know where that came from.” That was kind of my go-‐to. And now I had to own it because the Bible said that dumb thing I said to hurt her feelings, that wasn’t her fault, that wasn’t just an accident. That was a result of my heart. You see what happens is that sin does not need out permission to come in and take over. None of us sign up for the sin takeover. None of us signed that permission slip that said, “Sin, all yours, you can have it.” All it took was to let down our guard for a moment. It was a slip through the crack, and all of the sudden it came in, was left unaddressed, and then it took over. That is the way sin works in all of our lives. And that is why the father was looking at his son and said, “Look, you have to guard your heart. Guard your heart. Protect it with all vigilance. Guard your heart because it is out of the heart that everything flows.” So the father is saying, “Look, there are three big ways in which your heart is vulnerable to attack. I want to point them out so you can be sensitive to them and guard your heart appropriately.” He begins with this in verse 24. He said, “Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you.” So the father is saying the first area of vulnerability that you have in your life is speech; your mouth, you lips. That what started as a white lie turned into a web. What started as an innocent rumor turned into character defamation. What started as a slip of profanity turned into verbal vomit that I just cannot stop. Honestly for me this is one of the biggest areas I have to guard. I have found that when I spend my time watching TV shows or movies or listening to movies that have a ton of language in them, as much as I would love to think that I can filter on the fly, I am just not very good at it. I’ve found that when I surround myself with it, all of the sudden it starts coming back out. My mom was right with the garbage in, garbage out business. All she was doing was quoting Proverbs. It has been a decision of mine that if I am going to stay on this path, I have to avoid some of that stuff. It doesn’t mean that I can never see that movie. It doesn’t mean that I can never hear that song. It simply means that if I am sincere about this, I have to remove some of those things from my life. I just can’t filter on the fly like I think I can do. So I have to do that. My speech is vulnerable. Then he continues in verse 25. He says your second area vulnerable to attach is your eyes. He says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” He is warning us about our wandering eyes. All of us have them. You had that moment, the mountaintop moment, when you are like, “I am team Jesus. I am in. I am going to do this.” You are straight ahead and all of the sudden your eyes started bouncing to the other things in life. So the most obvious application of this is our lust, our sexual lust and the things that capture us. That is a massive one. But it is not just sexual. It can be our lust after anything, our materialistic lust. That if I get that thing, then I will be fulfilled. It could be lust over food if that is where I turn when I am down and out. It could be lust after alcohol if that is where I go when I have a bad day. It is basically whatever we say, “Jesus, you are not enough to comfort me, so I am going to choose this.” So the father is saying, “Watch your eyes. They will bounce if you are not careful. Keep them straight and focused.



Now, finally, the father says there is one more area where you are super vulnerable and I want you to pay attention in verses 26-‐27. He says, “Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or to the left; turn your foot away from evil.” He is saying, “Look, you can start on this path with the best of intentions but you will be tempted all over the place to swerve left, right, go back. There are all kinds of exit ramps on this path of righteousness and our job is to keep our feet firmly planted on that path.” A few weeks ago we talked about our plans and our future and our direction where we are headed in life and how God wants to be a part of that. He wants to speak into it. He wants to give us His wisdom. That is what the father is referring to here. Stay on this path. Watch your speech, watch your eyes, and watch your feet. They are vulnerable to attack. Now when we use this guarding your heart verbiage, when we talk about keeping our guard, usually what we assume is that it means I need to assume a defensive position from the attacks of the world. All of these arrows are coming at me and I need to get my shield up so I can bob and weave all the attacks of the world. And some of us have swung the pendulum so far the other way to where we say, “Okay, I am just going to like hold myself in this hole. I am going to build my bubble. I am just going to do Christian music, Christian movies, Christian t-‐shirts, Christian breath mints, and the whole deal. I am just team Jesus everywhere, team Jesus everything. So I am going to surround myself with this shield so that nothing can get in and nothing can attack me.” Hear me super clearly. Christian music, movies, that is all go for them, but we cannot assume that slightly modifying our behavior on the outside will ever change our hearts. That simply surrounding ourselves with Christian influences is not enough, that it is going to require a heart change. So yes we put up our shield against the attacks of the world, we also intentionally fill our hearts with the things of Jesus. That is the second pieces that some of us miss. So keep your shield up, but also intentionally fill your heart with the things of Jesus. I just want to wrap up with three kind of quick handles on how we can do that. What are the things that I can fill my heart with so that when I produce fruit it is things that honor Jesus? Number one is this, it is prayer. We have this opportunity to communicate back and forth with God, back and forth with Jesus, and some of us don’t take advantage of that at all. But if I want to be like Jesus I should probably spend some time with Him. So that is that conversation back and forth. Now prayer is not simply the grocery cart list of everything I want in life, but it is spending time listening to Jesus as He shapes, and molds, and directs me. The second one is this. It is reading, reading God’s Word. God has revealed Himself to us and if we want to be like Jesus then we should know more about Him. We read God’s Word and He reveals Himself to us. As we get to know Him, we can become more like Him. The final thing is this. It is community. All of us, like Dave said already, are designed to live in relationship, designed to live in community. So if I want to live like Jesus, then I should probably surround myself with people who are like Jesus. If all my influences are people who discourage and tear down and do not lift up, it is going to be a very hard road. So like we said already, in a couple of weeks we have this Life Group Connect. We want to see you in community, we want to surround you with people who will encourage you to be like Jesus. We pray, we read, we live in community.



So while we have our shield up with one hand, we are also constantly filling our hearts with the things of Jesus and that is how we guard our hearts. I would love to pray over you, so if you would please stand? What I want to do is I want to pray a prayer of courage to make some hard choices. I want to pray a prayer of endurance to fight the good fight. So if you would, please join me. God we love you so much and we thank you for Jesus. We thank you for your Spirit who shapes and molds and guides us. Right now we want to give it all up to you. Some of us are currently in the middle of slavery and we cannot get out, cannot see the light, cannot figure this thing our and we need you to break those bonds. We are coming to you. You have offered us freedom and we are ready. Some of us have lost our way, took the exit ramp when maybe we didn’t even mean to and we want to get back on the road. Make it clear to us God, speak truth into our lives, and shine the light even if we are not ready for it. Shine the light where we need to go. God we love you that you are willing to come into our mess. Save us and redeem us. You are the only one worth praising. It is in your name I pray. Amen.

proverbs: on guarding your heart… · 2015. 2. 12. ·...

Documents