Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:04 Good Morning Village Church.
Speaker 1 00:00:07 Appreciate that. That's a good greeting. My name is Eric Bowling, and I thought I'd take a couple minutes here just at the start of the sermon and introduce myself to you so you know a little bit, uh, about who I am. So I am the Director of Student Leadership and Service at Wheaton Academy, which means I am a high school educator. In addition to, uh, my directorship responsibilities, I'm also a classroom teacher. I teach AP psychology, intro to Psychology, sociology, and a terribly named class that it's really a lot of fun advanced topics in health, which is where we talk about all the stuff that you really can't talk about in other classes about culture and things like that. And so I've been at Wheaton Academy for 19 years, uh, and I know some of you're looking and you're going, ah, you look so young.
Speaker 1 00:00:57 I appreciate the os of you who thought that <laugh>. Um, but I've been there long enough that I've seen several generations of students come through. And one of the things that was really, uh, exciting for me, uh, when I came to church here at Village Church is a lot of these students that I taught early on are here. There's a strong, uh, Wheaton Academy contingent of people. And, and these students, especially the ones I taught earlier in my career, they're now raising families. And you know what, uh, some of these students, the Lord has blessed them with children exactly like them. <laugh>, right? God is good, isn't he? And so it's really a lot of fun to watch that and be a part of it. Uh, and so what I wanted to do this morning is we've been talking through a, a series on discernment, and we looked last week at Discerning God's will.
Speaker 1 00:01:51 And this week we're gonna look at discerning our heart motives, discerning our heart motives. Uh, this was something, I mean, quite honestly, it it, this is a challenging thing to, to preach on, uh, because I clearly have motives and I clearly have a heart and wrestling through all this, but it was a lot of fun. So, uh, before we get started in good educational fashion, uh, we're gonna define a couple terms. We're gonna look in an essential question. We're gonna try to answer. I did make a mental note, uh, to not run this like a classroom. So if you're on your cell phone, I'm not gonna tell you to put it away. If you're sleeping, I'm not gonna wake you up. Uh, if you're disruptive, I'm not gonna move you, uh, to a different spot or kick you out. So I, I promise that that's not gonna happen.
Speaker 1 00:02:41 So let's talk about this essential question. How do we discern our heart motives? How do we do that? That's gonna be the question that's gonna drive, uh, us this morning. How do we figure out our heart motives? How do we know if they're good or if they're bad, or if they're right or if they're wrong, or if they're appropriate or inappropriate? How do we know if they're following God or following self? That's what we're gonna try to answer. In order to do that, we're gonna define three terms right here at the beginning. The first one is this. Discernment is the ability to rightly determine what is going on or what's happening under the surface. The ability to know what's going on in here. Another way to to to think of this is what's, what's kind of the thing beneath the thing, right? Like what's happening underneath.
Speaker 1 00:03:31 So discernment, the second term we're gonna define is motive. Motive. Is this the psychological feature that drives an organism toward a desire goal? It's the goal or objective of a person's actions. So we're saying, how do we determine what's going on? Rightly determine what's happening inside. And then simply, why are we, why are we doing what we're doing? What's driving us? What's pushing us? The last one is heart. Heart is this. It's the spiritual core of who we are. It's, it's the down deep stuff that's in there. It involves our volition, like our choices, our will. It organizes our inner life, what's happening. So this morning we're really going to just look at how does our inner life drive our motivation? And how do we know where that's coming from? And this is why this is really important, because everything we do is driven by that inner life, our inner life.
Speaker 1 00:04:45 Everything that we do, all our motivations flow from that. Let's look at two verses. Proverbs 4 23 says this, keep your heart with all vigilance for from it flow the springs of life. Another translation says, above all else, guard your heart. And so it's important that we, that we protect that because what is inside flows outward. Let's look at another verse. Luke, chapter six, verse 45. 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, the mouth speaks.
Speaker 1 00:05:31 The inner life always finds a way out, doesn't it? Sometimes it, it leaks out and, and we say or do something that really, maybe we didn't intend, but it kind of comes out. Sometimes it explodes out and it just comes bursting out of us. And we're like, whoa. Where did, where did that come from? How, why, why did that happen? Well, because out of the heart comes good. Out of the heart comes evil. It always comes out the overflow of the mouth. The heart speed out the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. So how do we discern our heart motives? Uh, I'll be honest with you. Uh, it's complicated. <laugh>, it's complicated. Hearts and motives are difficult to discern. Let, let's do two, uh, thought kind of experiments together this morning. Okay? So the first one is this. I want you to think about someone else's behavior. So, so pick a behavior that you've seen somebody else do. Okay? Everybody got it? Okay, this is outside. Someone else. Ask yourself three questions. Question number one, why did they do what they did? Okay, question one, why did they do what they did? Question two, what were they thinking? Okay, question two, what were they thinking? Question three, why did they do it? Why did they do it?
Speaker 1 00:07:10 Now, I want us to rate ourselves on a scale of one. I have no idea. Three kinda to five. I know completely why they did what they did. How would you rate your ability to determine someone else's motives? I know it depends a little bit on what we thought of, but the reality of it is, is we don't really always know. My wife 29 years celebrated a milestone birthday a while back. And I'm not gonna tell you which one it was, because I like my wife and I love my wife, and I like when she's happy with me. You can certainly ask her what that was. But she decided for this birthday that she wanted to go skydiving.
Speaker 1 00:08:01 Oh, exactly right? So she decides she wants to go skydiving. And I remember saying, O okay, right? Like, you absolutely, let's do that. And it was fascinating 'cause you can't just like show up the day of and like go skydiving. Uh, so he kind of planned for this. And the whole time I'm thinking, why, why do you, why do you really want to do this? Right? And people would ask me, Hey, are you going skydiving? And I said, absolutely not. <laugh>. I'm a I'm a boots on the ground guy, right? Like, I, I don't need to go skydiving. So the day comes, and actually the first day we were gonna go, it was, it was like too cloudy. They couldn't jump that day. And then we tried to go again and something else happened. And I, I'm, you know, I'm not a prophet, but I'm starting to hint to my wife, like, maybe God's not in this, right?
Speaker 1 00:08:57 And so eventually we go, and I, I encourage you, if even if you don't sky, you need to go check this out. 'cause there is a whole skydiving subculture that I didn't know existed. So we go to this place and they give us all this paperwork, and it's literally every bad thing that can happen to you while skydiving. And and my wife is reading it. She's adventurous. She's, I I'm reading it going, oh my goodness, this could end badly, potentially, right? So we go and, and it's fascinating 'cause this, this little plane flies in comes, people get on it, it takes off and it goes up eight 15, 18,000 feet. And then people jump out of it. And then the plane lands and the people who jumped out go and refill their re refill, repackage their parachutes, and the next group goes, and this is happening over and over and over.
Speaker 1 00:09:49 And I'm a people watcher, right? Like I'm a psychology person. And so I asked a guy, I was like, how many times have you jumped today? And he goes, ah, today's kind of a slow day for me. I've jumped 12 <laugh>. I said, you, you have been up 18,000 feet. He's like, yeah, wow. So it's time for my wife to jump in. She, she talked, uh, she didn't talk. She, my daughter went with, she's adventuresome. Uh, one of my wife's friends and then one of my daughter's friends. So it comes time for 'em to go. And I notice now they don't just give my wife the parachute and say, all right, jump out. They strap her to this young tattooed kind of mus, you know, muscular, skydiving guy. I'm not intimidated by him, but I, you know, I'm like, I I gave him a couple.
Speaker 1 00:10:38 Looks like, hey, watch it. Right? So they go and they get into this plane and I'm sitting watching the plane takes off and about 15 minutes later, I see this tiny.in the sky. And I'm like, well, that must be the plane. And then these other little dots kind of jump out. And I'm watching. And I had, I had kind of a morbid thought, I gotta be honest. I said, this is, this is either gonna, I'm gonna be really happy or really sad at the end of this. Like, there's only two outcomes. If it doesn't work, I'm walking, I'm leaving a widower. And thankfully it worked. Or I told you, I said, that's a bad, the heart motives, right? Sometimes things leak out. <laugh>. So she lands, it's great. There we go. Now to this day, I have no idea why she wanted to do that. On my milestone birthday of the same age, someone asked me, what do you wanna do? I said, I really wanna sit in a room with people I like <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:11:35 And they're like, really? That's it. So motives, other people. Let's continue our little thought experiment. Let's look at our own behaviors. Think of a behavior that you have done. Okay? Ask yourself the same three questions. Why did you do what you did? What were you thinking? What was your motivation? Scale of one? I have no idea. Three, I kind of know five. I got it probably on the lower end of that scale. 'cause sometimes we're just not sure. Lemme show you, uh, an example. We'll put both of these two thoughts together. This is Ryan Cheney and I, some of you know Ryan. Uh, this is from the first Tuesday men's event that we had a couple weeks ago. And Ryan and I won the bags tournament. I next time, uh, yes, thank you, mark. We, he lost to us. And uh, you know, so we win this bag sermon.
Speaker 1 00:12:34 So being the good digital citizen, I am, I took this picture, uh, and I put it on my Facebook page, right? And I put it on there and I write this witty caption. And in true social media fashion, a minor debate breaks out in the comments. And the debate is this bags versus cornhole. Now, I'm of the persuasion that it is called bags. That's me. People are, I mean, it got, didn't get crazy heated, but there was some back and forth. I did find out that the American, uh, professional association is called the American Cornhole League. There you go. Still bags to me. So I, I put this picture up and if you really ask me why did you feel the need to put this picture up? I gotta be honest, I, I spent some time thinking, why did I put this up? Why do I put anything on Facebook?
Speaker 1 00:13:37 Well, maybe I put it up there because, uh, I like Ryan Cheney, he's a cool guy. And I want people to know Ryan and I are friends. He's a pretty prolific Facebook guy. We're friends. I'm Ryan and I are tight. Look, we're tight. Maybe I put it up because, uh, 'cause I like winning, right? And I, I want people to see that guy's a winner. He won the Village Church of Bartlett, men's First Tuesday bags. Hey, there was some formidable challenges out there, right? Uh, maybe I put it up there because I was angry. The church didn't promote it more. It wasn't on the website, it wasn't on there. I mean, right? There's all kinds of reasons. And if I really stop and I really dig and I really try to get out, why did I do this? To be honest with you, I might have conflicting motives.
Speaker 1 00:14:25 I might have mixed motives. I might have some good, I might have some bad. And that's the way that we look when we, at life, when we think about this. So this morning we're gonna look at two frameworks to discerning our heart motives. We're gonna contrast them together. The first framework we're gonna look at is, I'm just gonna call it the secular framework. It, it's a view where there's no God humanity's in the center. Okay? So there's no God humanity's in the center. And then the second view we're framework, we're gonna contrast that with, we're just gonna call the sacred and it's God in the center. And we're gonna look at the, the secular framework first. And we're gonna see what does that tell us about heart? And what does that tell us about our motivation? How does it help us discern our heart motives?
Speaker 1 00:15:11 I'm gonna put a picture up here. And I want to know if you recognize, uh, these two guys, anybody know who these guys are? You, you might know the guy on the left. I don't know if you'll know the guy on the right. Okay? This is Sigmund Freud and this is Carl Rogers. And the reason I picked these two is because these two psychologists have had a huge influence over culture. Now there's mul culture's multifaceted, there's lots of things that go into it. So these, these two aren't the only two. But for our illustration this morning, we're gonna look at them. So Sigmund Freud, uh, we'll start with him. So Sigmund Freud was famous for saying that religion is the crutch of the weak. He's pretty anti-God. And so he developed this theory of psychoanalysis where he tried to determine people in a reality outer reality.
Speaker 1 00:16:08 And he developed this really, uh, it's very philosophical. There's lots of pieces to it. Uh, but basically he said inside all of us are two competing. He called 'em instincts and we would load them as motivation. What drives us? He said, there's two. And they're co-equal one he called death instincts, he called it thanatos. And he said, in that is the desire for damage and destruction and hurt. He said, that's inside of us. He said the opposite one was life instincts. And he called that arrows. He said, that's the desire for pleasure, beauty, uh, good things he said. And those two things are inside of us, and they battle back and forth, and we're not even aware that they're happening. So it's literally like we are compelled by these forces within us that we are helpless to do anything about. And we just kind of bounce back and forth between the two as we're pushed and pulled.
Speaker 1 00:17:08 And that was the dominant theory until Carl Rogers came along. Carl Rogers came along in the, roughly this, this 1960s. And he looked at Freud's theory and he said, I don't think that's right. He said, what I think is that people have an, a desire to become the best them they can be. And he developed a theory that was basically based off this idea of self actualization, that what we're all motivated for is becoming the best version of ourselves. And he said, that's what's, that's what's happening. That's where people are. That's what people are doing. Carl Rogers theme stuck. And it became sort of the foundational narrative for culture. Because Rogers said this, people are basically good with innate goodness, right? So people, according to Rogers, which became the dominant cultural theory, are basically good with innate goodness. And that, that, uh, ideology drives two really strong cultural narratives. They're this speak your truth, follow your heart.
Speaker 1 00:18:29 Almost everything produced by culture follows this formula. If you, if you watch a movie, read a book, watch a show, it, it follows this, there's a person who has this unrecognized inner potential that is somehow being held down or repressed or stopped by something out there. And the person's job is to follow their heart and figure out what to do about it. And once they do, they address the issues and life ends very happily for them. And this is important to understand because when we interact with a culture, this is the operating system. This is why it's so dominant. So we might read it and go, why? Why is that such a big deal? Because the push is towards authenticity. Our feelings are what is real. Now, once we understand that, that helps frame a lot of other things for us. Where, where people now have the ability to feel something.
Speaker 1 00:19:36 And therefore, it is correct. It is right. It is their truth. So when someone says, I am a fill in the blank, trapped in a, fill in a blank, that's because their feelings have been separated from everything else. And if the heart is basically good with an innate goodness, then it should be trusted. So if I feel it, then I am responsible to be authentic to myself to follow my truth, which is to do what my heart wants. And that's where we are with culture. But there's an issue with human hearts and human motivation. There's a monkey wrench. There's a ghost in the machine. Something isn't right.
Speaker 1 00:20:27 Let's go back to psychology for a second. Psychology operates on, again, people are basically good with an innate sense of goodness. It struggles to explain evil. 'cause if that's true, then why do we do horrific things? Why do people commit atrocities? There were two famous studies that tried to address this. The first one is the Stanley Milgram Obedience study. This happened in 1961, and Stanley Milgram was wondering, he, uh, again, the world is recovering after World War ii. And Stanley Milgram was wondering, why did so many people, particularly, uh, particularly in Germany, why did they, were they so quick to join and, and commit this atrocity against Jewish people? He said, why did this happen? And so he wanted to develop a study where he could see how far would people go in obeying authority. So he developed this machine, he called it, and this is such a sixties term, isn't it? The shock generator.
Speaker 1 00:21:40 So what he did was he made this machine. Now this machine is harmless, but he made it look pretty imposing. You can see at the bottom, it's a little grainy, but it talks about slight shock all the way to danger, severe shock. And then the last one's like X, x, X. And so what he did was he would have two people, now actually three people. He would have someone he called the teacher, someone he called the learner, and someone who was the researcher. Now the researcher and the learner were in on the experiment. The teacher was not. So what they would do is they would bring this person in, they would introduce, uh, the teacher to the learner, and they would, the learner would say something like, now this isn't dangerous, right? I've got heart problems. And the researcher would say, no, it's fine. Nothing's gonna happen. And then they would take the teacher and put the teacher in a separate room where he could hear the learner book, couldn't see him. And the researcher goes into the room with the teacher, and the teacher would ask a series of questions. Now, the questions were nonsensical. There's no right or wrong answer. It was like pairs, it'd read three words and try to get the fourth word back. And this, the experiment was designed to see how far would people go in giving electric shocks?
Speaker 1 00:23:04 Oh, well, I won't ruin the complete surprise. But people went a lot farther than they thought they would. And the experiment was really hard on people. I mean, can you imagine if you think that you have taken the life of someone else because a guy in a lab coat says, please continue. And they get to the results. And, and they're, they're, they're sort of flabbergasted. They're like, what? This doesn't make sense. Like people should stop long before this. Like, they could've left the experiment at any time. All it really was was the researcher saying, please continue the experiment. That was study one where they left them wondering. In 1971, a second study was done, the Zimbardo Stanford Prison experiment. So Philip Zimbardo at the time was a young researcher, a psychologist, and he wanted to build off the work of Milgram. Uh, and so he developed an experiment where he designed a mock prison, and they put an advertisement in the paper, uh, for young men to come and be a part of this experiment where half would be prisoners, half would be guards, and then they would see how, what would happen in this makeshift prison.
Speaker 1 00:24:19 So he took two classrooms in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University, converted them to prisons. They divvied up the normal college age guys, and they made some guards and made some prisoners. And they started the experiment. They did a couple of interesting things for the prisoners. They made them wear this, uh, chain around their ankle as a reminder, they were in captivity. They made 'em wear these like smocks with just numbers on it. And they referred to them by number. The guards all had these, these mirrored sunglasses, so you couldn't see their eyes. And they started the experiment, and Zimbardo and his research team would basically sit at one end of a hallway and watch what happened. And it was 24 7. The experiment was supposed to go for two weeks. It lasted six days because the treatment of the guards to the prisoners got so bad, they were really flirting with some, some areas of like abusing people.
Speaker 1 00:25:22 And they shut it down. And then Zimbardo went through, and he continues in the rest of his career to try to explain why did this happen? When I teach this to my students at Wheaton Academy, I always pause there and say, why did this happen? And we know the answer because we have our Bible, and we're gonna go to that in a second. But what psychology misses the dead end it gets to is this is sin distorts our ability to regular discern our hearts. Lemme give you three things here that I think happens. So there's many more than this, but these are three common ones. The first one is this rationalization. We're pretty good at rationalizing our behavior away, right? Even when we know it's wrong. Like we're good at, at fooling ourselves. I mentioned before, I've been married for 29 years, I'm pretty good at rationalizing why I forget to do things or why I didn't do things that I knew I should.
Speaker 1 00:26:31 I'm, I'm pretty good with that. We have three children. I never, ever had to teach them how to rationalize. Now look, honey, if you get caught, you just exp I didn't. They they came out of the womb knowing how to do that pretty good, right? Denial. Sometimes we just deny it. Ah, that's not, that didn't happen that way. Nah, that's not, that's not what it was. That that's, that's not the way, uh, that you're interpreting it wrong. That's not right. Again, we're good at this. The last one is confirmation bias, where we like other people to validate what we already think Twitter or X as it's now called. It's interesting how this has influences our culture. Only 12% of people are on Twitter. So 82% of the people, if my math is correct, aren't using this platform at all. The issue is the people who are using it are influential celebrities, actors, politicians, people that have a voice, right? So they're on it. Another interesting thing about this platform is they did a study, uh, this was like kind of pre covid, I, where almost up to 40% of all tweets are fake.
Speaker 1 00:27:55 And it's, it's fascinating when you look at this because what this has enabled us to do is create confirmation for everything we think. So if I go on Twitter and I make an account, I can follow everybody who thinks like I think, and I can retweet it, I can like it, I can share it. And so we get in these little places where we just get confirmed about what we already think and why we're doing what we're doing. And so this distortion through rationalization and denial and confirmation bias makes it even harder to discern our hearts. See, when we follow a secular framework, it's, it's incomplete at best. Like we get to the end of it and we're left with more questions than answers. And we're like, yeah, we're not sure. We, we don't know. Maybe we can know, maybe we can't know. And the issue is this, when God is removed, the self becomes the determiner of what's true, right?
Speaker 1 00:29:05 So when we take God out of the equation, we're left with us. I won't speak for you, I'll speak for me. I'm not a great evaluator of self. I'm not good at that, that that's not my role. That's not why I was created. That's God's role. And so when we remove God, we're left with us being the determiner of truth. Now, I mentioned before that when these experiments go wrong and people can't explain, why are all these evil things happening? The Bible tells us, let's look at Jeremiah 17, nine. Jeremiah 17, nine says this, the heart, the inner core of our being is deceitful. It's tricky. It deceives, it lies, it, it, it, it, it makes it so it's, it's hard to pin down. It's deceitful and desperately sick who can understand it? It's deceitful. It's desperately sick who can understand it? And sometimes we might be tempted to, to kind of stop there with an incomplete picture and say, well, I guess our hearts are deceitful and sick.
Speaker 1 00:30:15 It nothing we can do about it until Jesus comes back. Right? But that's not the end of the story. Because when we go back to our question, how do we discern our heart motives? We come to this. We understand that God looks at and caress a lot about the human heart, right? God looks at our hearts. He cares about our hearts. He sees what people can't see. Let's look at this verse together. Psalm 1 39, 1 to four. It says, oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. Notice the exclamation point. The psalmist is like, Lord, you've done this. You've provided this for me. You've searched me, you've known me. And look at all that goes through the next couple verses. You know, when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path, my lying down or acquainted with all my ways, even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh, oh Lord, you know it altogether.
Speaker 1 00:31:22 See, God knows us intimately. I can fool you. You can fool me. I can fool myself. You can fool yourself. We can't fool God, right? 'cause he knows us intimately and he caress about our hearts. Here's good news. God looks at our hearts and he says, that's salvageable. That's saveable. That's worth sending my son to die for. That's worth providing an opportunity to have a relationship with me for. And that fills me with a lot of hope, because when I look at myself and I try to determine what's happening in here, it's a mess. But I have a God who knows me intimately and who caress about my heart. And he says, that's worth saving.
Speaker 1 00:32:21 But we do need a change of heart, don't we? That comes through this. Let's look at Psalm 50, sorry, Psalm 51, verse 10, create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me. See, God wants to give us these new hearts. God wants to create in us right spirits because he loves us and he caress for us. And he knows if we're left to ourselves, the result is going to be disorder, destruction, chaos, because we need Him. And he's provided that changed hearts. Then create changed motivations. So we have this change of heart created me a clean heart renewal, right spirit. And then what that does, because the inner always drives the outer, we have changed motivations. Let's look at Matthew 6 21 for where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. Now, I find it fascinating, the way this is worded. It doesn't say where your heart is there, your treasure. It says where your treasure is, your heart's there as well. And so when we ask God to create in us a clean heart and renew our right spirits, we have new motivations. Whereas before, my motivation is all probably designed towards myself and self-protection and self-preservation. And now because I have a changed heart and I've got a renewed spirit, I've got a new set of motivation that can drive me towards behavior.
Speaker 1 00:34:08 Which is part of why when Christians do things that don't make sense culturally, you kind of, if you know, you know, right? Because you're like, well, of course they did that. Of course they, that they reacted that way. Of course, they followed that. And the witness of Christians throughout history has left people going, why? Because God wants to draw everyone to himself. And so this idea is we create a clean God creates a clean heart in us, a renewed spirit. It changes our motivations. We go from, from self-centered to Jesus focused, from self-centered to Christ-centered. And we have new motivations and a new heart. A heart that wants to please God, A heart that wants to follow God, a heart that wants to do what's right. The the hard part is, and I said at the beginning, it's complicated. This is an already not yet reality for us. That we have this, we have new hearts, we have renewed spirits. We have an ability to choose good and not evil. We have an ability to follow Jesus. We have an ability to have the mind of Christ, but we still struggle with our inner reality.
Speaker 1 00:35:30 Romans seven, Paul says, the things I want to do, I don't do the things I don't want, want to do, I do. I love what he says in the King James, who can save me from this wretched body of death. He says, thanks be to God is through Christ Jesus. And so we have this ability, but we struggle and we have to check ourselves. And that leads me to our, so whats so what? Number one, we need to ask God and allow God to be the evaluator of our heart motives, to say to God, look, I need you to figure this out because I'm not very good at it. Look at this verse with me. Psalm 1 39, 23 24, search me oh God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any grievous way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. That's a prayer I would encourage you to adopt and say, search me God. I I'm gonna lay it open to you. Even the things I think I'm hiding from you. God, you have access to it. Search me. And if you've ever prayed this, you know when you ask that God will do it, and he will take you to depths. And it's a little scary, but God is good. God is good. And so we ask God to evaluate and be the soul evaluator of our hearts. That's number one. The second thing, in terms of our motivation,
Speaker 1 00:37:15 We need to follow Jesus by dying to self. Now that idea of dying to self, uh, is, is sometimes, uh, tricky for us because we read it and we think, oh, well, that means I need to go and I need to, to embrace all this kind of stoic, spartan mindset where I forego anything modern and I go maybe move out to the desert and I live this life. Uh, maybe, I mean, I'm not gonna tell you what God may or may not say to you, uh, but I think dying to self really, uh, is as simple, uh, as this. Let's look at Galatians 5 24. It says, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. So if we're following Christ, we take the flesh, our passion desires, and we crucify it. And the reason we can do this is because of what Jesus has already done. And because Jesus has already, uh, his finished work on the cross allows us to do this. And I think when we see dying to self, this kind of goes with asking God to evaluate our hearts.
Speaker 1 00:38:30 It it might mean we, we have things that we have put on the throne of our life that don't belong there. It might mean that we have supplanted, uh, Christ for ourselves, and we need to take that ourself down and elevate him to his proper place. Instead of us being worshiped, we should be worshiping him. And so I would encourage you as you go through, uh, the rest of today or even this week, to, to think through and to ask the spirit and pray through like, what, what do I need to, to have shift in my life?
Speaker 1 00:39:15 It could be good things. It could be good things like our children or our jobs or our finances or, I, I can't tell you what it's going to be for you, but what I can tell you is that if you are willing to pray and ask that, then God's gonna show up and he's going to do it. And so discerning our heart, motives in and of ourselves, we can't do it very well. But if we rely on the power of the Holy Spirit through God's word, then the Lord is going to take us to where we need to go and give us these new hearts and renewed spirits and lead us in the right ways. Let's pray together.
Speaker 1 00:40:06 God, even as I, I finished the sermon this morning, I am grateful to you that you are a God that looked and looks at the heart and sees that it's deceitful and see that it's sick, but yet you say it's salvageable and you provided the perfect sacrifice of Jesus to create in us these new hearts and renew these spirits. Lord, help us as we go through the rest of the day today, next week, Lord, all of those things help us to rely on you as the evaluator of our hearts. Help us to be people who are sensitive to our inner realities, who would stop and ask, is this what you want? Am I on the right path? God, search me and know me. Lord, we thank you that if we pray those prayers, you are faithful to answer them. We love you and we appreciate all that you have done and continue to do for us. And we pray this in your name. Amen.
