Stepping Up to a Clean Heart -Part 1

Marcus titled this message stepping up to a Clean Heart.

a rotting carcass in the middle of that spring. And before he can drink, he has to take that carcass of the buffalo out, make sure that the water is clean so that he can take advantage of the water that's there. One of the tactics of warfare in the old days was to pollute the wells and the springs of the enemy. Some of the ancient armies would take animals that had died of diseases, and they had dropped them in the well waters, or drop them in the

springs where the water where a river would start. And so when the opposing armies came to give water to their horses or came to drink themselves, they would become poisoned by the water because there was a carcass or a dead animal inserted into that well. The Bible says in Proverbs chapter four verse 23, keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flows the springs of life. Another version says, guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life. What is in

our heart determines the course of our life. What the writer of Proverbs is doing is giving us the image. And he's saying that your heart is like a spring of water. It's constantly producing life and everything in your life. Your relationships, your attitudes, your mindset, your success and your destiny are affected by that which is in your heart. If there is something in your heart that is good, it flows into all of your life. If there's something

in your heart that's Polluted. It also flows into all of your life. Notice that the writer of Proverbs says, guard your heart. We only guard things that are important and valuable in our house. Thursday evening is trash day. It's my son Josiah's responsibility to take out the trash, to put it in front of the house, and to get it ready for the garbage man the next morning. He doesn't like that responsibility. He claims we mass produce garbage.

But we take out the garbage on Thursday night. Never once in all these years of taking garbage out and putting it in front of our house, have I ever stayed up at night looking out the window, guarding my garbage? Never. I've never given my son a baseball bat and said, you know, I want you to spend all night sleeping next to our garbage to make sure no one takes it. No, I don't care about our garbage. It's garbage. You don't guard that, which is not important. Right. You only watch

over that which is important. So? So when we put out the garbage at night. During the night, someone wants to take it. Go ahead, take it. Just don't make a mess. It's garbage. I don't watch my garbage. However, Thursday night comes and my daughter doesn't come in at time of curfew time. I'm looking through the window, waiting for her to her to show up. Is she arrived yet? What's going on? And sending her a text. Why? Because she's important to me, not the garbage. That is not important.

You guard what you feel is important in your life. How many of you dads know what I'm talking about? Alright, well, in the same way the writer of Proverbs is saying, your heart needs to be guarded. You need to watch over your heart with all diligence, because what happens to your heart will happen to your life. What you allow around your heart will affect every single area of your life. You say, well, pastor, how do I know what's in my heart? How do I know if there's a carcass

in my heart or something contaminating my heart? Well, Jesus said in Matthew chapter 15, verse 18, but the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart and defile a person. What Jesus said is, if you want to know what's in your heart, ask yourself what's coming out of your mouth. Because eventually whatever's in your heart is going to come out of your mouth. Oh, you may be able to hide it for some time.

You may be able to guard your mouth for a while, but it's just a matter of time before whatever's in your heart is going to start spilling out of your mouth. Because out of the King, James says, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. I travel a lot, speaking in different places and sometimes in different countries. And so I sit on the plane near strangers. And I always when I sit down, I always ask myself if someone is to my right or to my left. I

wonder what they're about. And so I usually try to engage in conversation and give me about 15 to 20 minutes. And I usually can tell what that person is about, because after a little bit of conversation, whatever they're into is going to start coming out of their mouth. Some people are into education and some people are into sports, and some people are into fun, and some people whatever's there.

If someone is angry at the world in 20 minutes, they'll start ranting and raving about the world and the system and politics and how unjust things are. It comes out because out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth starts to speak. I usually don't like to tell them I'm a pastor right up front. Because if I tell them I'm a pastor and then they try to clean everything up before they they it comes out. So

I like to get the unedited version. Then about a half hour into the conversation, when they find out I'm a pastor, they start thinking, oh, what did I say? They start trying to clean up everything they said and excuse their French and so forth. That's how usually it happens. But out of your heart, your mouth speaks. Listen, if you have bitterness in your heart, resentment in your soul, it's just a matter of time that it starts to come out of your mouth. It will erupt out of

your mouth and unexpected times. Why? Because it's in your heart. And so Jesus tells us that it's not what goes into our mouth that really defiles us. It's what comes out of our mouth that defiles us. It's the words that come out of our mouth. I like what one person said. They said, what is in the well of the heart will come up out of the bucket of the mouth. Whatever is in your heart, you're going to pull out of the bucket of your mouth and it's going to show up that way. Chuck Swindoll says it

this way. How important is the heart? It is there. That character is formed. It alone holds the secret of true success. Its treasures are priceless. But they can be stolen. So I want you to turn in your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 12. And I'm going to talk to you today about how to do a heart audit, how to look, how to look in your heart and make sure that there's nothing there that shouldn't be there. I have a

feeling that some of you have been living years. Some of you months, some of you decades, with certain carcasses in your heart that have been polluting your life, and you're not even aware of it. And I think today God wants to speak to some of your hearts about cleaning the debris around the spring of your life so that clean, fresh, pure life can come out of your heart instead of that which is contaminated. Hebrews chapter 12, verses 12 through 17. It says, therefore strengthen your feeble

arms and weak knees. Make level the paths of your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled but rather healed. Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy. Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one misses the grace of God, and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral or godless like Esau, who for a

single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterwards, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears. So in Hebrews chapter 12, the writer of the Hebrews tells us how to keep our heart clean, how to do a heart check.

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So how to take care of your heart? I'm going to give you five quick things of how to take care of your heart and to be able to clean up anything that may not need to be there. Number one, strengthen your grip on the things that really matter. Notice what it says in verse 12. Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Discouragement, disappointment, and disillusionment can weaken our grip on the things that really matter in life.

Have you ever noticed that when you get discouraged, you feel weak? Well, I noticed that in the Olympics, especially on the beam where the gymnasts would perform these acrobatics. Did you notice that when a gymnast makes a mistake at the beginning of the routine, then suddenly it seems like they'll make more mistakes because they're discouraged. That which is strong becomes weak. Their confidence dissipates. Why? They've made a mistake. And because they make a mistake, they become discouraged.

And when you become discouraged, you start getting weak. When you're encouraged, you become strong. When you're discouraged, you become weak. One of the greatest tactics of the enemy is to discourage us somehow in our life. So those things that we are holding on to that we know are good, right? True, virtuous, we start losing our grip. He uses the illustration of feeble hands and weak knees. Oh, I've seen it over and over. I've seen someone that was going really strong

and doing really well, and somehow they become discouraged. Maybe they get disappointed in someone that was supposed to help them and didn't help them. Or maybe they feel like they called to God for an answer to prayer that didn't come. Or maybe they have tried to really change their ways, but keep struggling, and then they become discouraged. And instead of hanging on tight, they start loosening their grip. Instead of holding on tight to what they know, they

need to hold on to those habits. Maybe someone committed at the beginning of the year. I'm going to spend some time with God every morning before I start the day. But you come discouraged and instead of hanging on tight, you start loosening the grip. Maybe you determine at the beginning of the year, I'm not going to allow some of the friendships I've had in the past to influence my life in a negative way and take me down. And you were strong in the beginning, resisting their influence,

but you got discouraged. And so now you're allowing them to influence your life again and take you in a spiral downward. The writer of the Hebrews says, strengthen your grip, strengthen your knees. It's not time to let go of the things you need to hang on to. It's time to grip them stronger. It's time to hold on stronger, not to let go. God has given you some. Some of you visions and dreams as to what he's called

you to do. Some of you are in the midst of education, and you know that you need to pursue that degree, because that degree opens up doors to your calling. But boy, does it get long and hard and expensive. So some of you begin to weaken the grip, thinking, wow, it's a lot. It's hard, I don't know, can I do this? Maybe I'll take a semester off or 2 or 3 and maybe God is saying, I gave you a vision. I gave you a dream. Now pursue it. It tells us in this passage is strengthen your feeble

arms and strengthen your weak knees. Number two, I'm talking about how to strengthen our heart and get it in the right place, how to take care of our heart, take care of the hurts and injuries quickly before they become disabling. Notice what it says in verse 13. Make level paths for your feet so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed. Now notice he's using

spiritual language but talking about our body. And he says, make straight paths for your feet so that those that are lame or those that are injured may not become disabled but healed. How many of you know that you can allow an injury to become worse, and eventually it can disable you? When I was young, I broke quite a few bones. I broke my arm. I broke bones in my hand. I had stitches in my head, stitches in my ear. I broke my arm, falling off a tree and cracked. Snapped both bones in my arm so

my arm looked like this. We went to the hospital. The doctor reset the bones in my arm. Put a cast. In those days they used to use plaster, plastered up my arm, and he said, you need to take care of that until your arm heals. But that was pretty active, young man. And I was probably about nine years old.

And about a week later I was off on a bicycle with a friend, and we actually fell off a bridge with our bicycle and I rebroke the cast cracked it into again and he broke his leg, cracked his tooth, and so I had to show up to the same doctor a week and a half later with a broken arm again, and he said, young man, I will have to cut your arm open and put a pin in there. This arm could be disabled unless you take care of it.

This arm has to heal. It's happened to some of you, hasn't it, that you sprang your leg or something happens and you don't take care of it. You keep walking on it and walking on it and walking on it. And finally it becomes so bad that you become disabled. I had a friend of mine, played football for many years and and messed up his knees and his knees got worse and worse and worse so he could barely walk.

He had to. He had to walk with. With a walker, with a crutch because his knees got so bad and they had to operate. And what, what is telling us in this passage is that life is full of inevitable hurts. You and I will be hurt by people in our life. Life hurts sometimes, period. You can't make it through life without getting hurt. Someone's going to bump you. Someone's going

to disappoint you. Someone's going to hurt you because they didn't follow through on their commitment, or because you thought they were loyal to you, and then they turned their back on you, or you thought they were a friend and they talked about you behind your back, or you thought they were going to show up and really back you in your time of need, and they weren't there when you needed them. And so life is full of hurts. It may be your father, your mother, your brother, your sister,

your friend, your aunt, your cousin, your. And when they disappoint you, you become hurt. I have seen more people tube out spiritually because they didn't take care of their injuries, their heart injuries than almost any other reason. I've seen people fall away. Make sure that when you get injured, you take care of that injury so that it doesn't turn in to disability, but instead you become healed. Whatever happens in your heart, if it's undealt with will show

up in your life. If you allow a seed of resentment or bitterness to get into your heart and you don't deal with it and heal it, it may start because someone hurts you and you nurse that hurt, that hurt you rehearse that. You tell other people about it. It's turned into a disability, and now you find yourself paralyzed at the side of the road wondering what happened. It all happened because you got hurt and you didn't properly deal with the hurt of your heart.

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in your daily life. Just open up your favorite app store today and download the Bold Steps app for free. I'm Wayne Shepherd signing off, but be sure to join us tomorrow for part two of our message on stepping up to a clean heart. That's Friday on Bold Steps with Mark Jones. Bold steps is a production of Moody Radio, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute.