Today on Bold steps, Mark Jobe shows us how we can purify our hearts.
If you're not careful and you allow bitterness, or you allow some sort of carcass around your heart and you don't take it out, what happens is that carcass is going to cause your heart to grow hard and contaminated. A contaminated heart will cause you for a season to fall away from God.
Welcome to Bold Steps with Mark Jobe. Mark is the president of Moody Bible Institute and the senior pastor of New Life Community Church in Chicago. And I'm Wayne Shepherd. Today, as we move forward in our study on living higher, we're continuing our discussion on stepping up to a clean heart. Today, Mark is going to show us how we can purify our hearts and deal with the things that cause us conflict.
We started this message last week, but if you missed the first two points, you can catch up online when you visit. Bold steps org. Let's not delay any longer. Here's Mark Jobe with today's bold steps.
Jesus talks a lot about being peacemakers. Blessed are the peacemakers. It's our job to pursue peace, to chase after peace, to do what's in our power, to make things right with people that were in conflict with. That means that, listen, we are peace initiators. Some of us find ourselves wanting peace, but we set back with our arms crossed and think, I'm not going to do anything. They need to come to me. I'm just waiting. I believe as followers of Jesus, though,
we need to be peace initiators. That means that we take the initiative to pursue peace, that we are the ones that if there's a conflict, if there's something wrong, if we're not in the right place with someone else that we actually take the first step to make things right. Romans chapter 14, verse 19 says, let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and the things
wherewith 1st May edify one another. Matthew chapter five, verse 23 and 24 Jesus is speaking, and he says, when you come therefore to present your offering at the altar. In other words, when you're in church and you're about to present your offering to God, and it may be the offering of worship, or it may be coming, presenting your heart before God. And there you remember that a brother has something against you. Leave your offering there at the altar and go your way. First, be reconciled to
your brother, and then come and present your offering. In other words, what God is saying is that if you're in the house of God, if you're trying to live for God and you know that there is something wrong between you and someone else and you haven't attempted to make it right, then leave whatever you're doing there, go make it right and then come to God so that there can be a flow in your life. Now here's
what I want you to understand. I want you to understand that not everybody we attempt to make peace with will want to have peace with us. So Jesus doesn't say, be at peace with everybody. He says, make an effort to be at peace. I may go. I may apologize, I may initiate a conversation. I may say I'm sorry, or we have a bad tension here. And they may say, well, I don't care. I don't want to have anything to do with you. Then I can't make them be at peace with me, but I can do my part in
releasing them. Are you with me? Are you hearing me? This is really important. I don't want you to be under false guilt, because some people feel if someone's if someone has something against them, that they have to make it right. Sometimes you'll do everything in your power. You'll apologize, you'll extend a token of peace to them. And they don't want it. They're still angry. If they're angry and they're full of resentment and bitterness, that's up to them.
And God, all you can do is try to make peace. But you can't force someone into peace. They have to want it. But as long as your conscience is clean, as long as you've said I'm sorry, as long as you've made an effort to talk, as long as you've extended the branch of peace toward them, that's what's important, because what they do between them and God, you can't
force them into peace. Jesus had a lot of enemies, and sometimes they were enemies because they they didn't like the fact that he was light and they were darkness and refused to follow after that. Number four deal with the roots of bitterness before they spread contamination. Verse 15 says, 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 to it that no one misses the grace of God. What is the grace of God?
It's the favor of God. Listen to what he's saying. See to it that no one misses the favor of God. Because they allow a root of bitterness in their heart. When you become bitter, then the favor of God cannot flow on your life because God's favor can't be poured out on a bitter person. See to it that no one misses the grace of God, and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. Let
me tell you something about bitterness. The best time to deal with bitterness is when it's a root and not when it's a plant. When you get hurt and you feel yourself angry, and then you feel yourself turning resentful toward someone. Sometimes we want to nurse it. We want to protect it. We feel like we have the right to become angry. We've been hurt. We've been damaged. We like to keep that resentment. And that little plant starts growing up, and it gets bigger and bigger, and it
grows seeds. It grows fruit. And that fruit has seeds, and it spreads into our life. And guess what? It tends to spread into other people's lives as well. And pretty soon before we know it, our whole life is affected by that bitterness and the people that were that are around us are, are affected by that bitterness as well. And that's why the writer of the Hebrews says, make sure that the root of bitterness does not grow up
and cause trouble and defile many. I've seen so many people lose their way because they allowed bitterness to spring up in their heart and rob them of so much that God had for their life. I've seen people fall away from God, fall away from the family, make a lot of bad decisions because they held resentment against someone in their life, and it just did not let them go forward in their walk with God, in their relationship. I've seen roots of bitterness cause marriages to go down
the route of divorce. I've seen roots of bitterness caused children to reject their parents and not have anything to do with them and go down a different path. I've seen roots of bitterness contaminate people's lives and grow up and spread the people around them as well. It's a dangerous, dangerous thing. And then, number five, don't allow your heart
to get hardened and lose out on your destiny. In verse 16, he goes on and he says, see that no one is sexually immoral or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterwards, you know, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected. He could bring about no change of mind, though he sought the blessing with tears.
The fifth thing I want you to understand about keeping your heart clean is that if you're not careful and you allow bitterness, or you allow some sort of carcass around your heart and you don't take it out, what happens is that carcass is going to cause your heart to grow hard and contaminated. And if you're not careful, a contaminated heart will cause you for a season to fall away from God. This is what happened with Esau. Esau allowed his heart to get hard. He was a twin.
His brother was Jacob. He was Esau. But he allowed some contamination in his heart, and that contamination allowed his heart to grow hard. And during the hardness of his heart he made poor choices about his life. And those poor choices affected the rest of his life. Look up at me because this is really important. I want you to hear this. God is a God of second chances.
No matter where you've been or how long you've been there, or how far you've fallen, or what mistakes you've made or failures you've had in your life, God can always restore you, forgive you, cleanse you, and make you new. He has the power to do so. He has that power. And if you've been at this church for some time, you've heard me preach that because we have people from
every walk of life. I've heard about every kind of story you can imagine, and I have seen lives that people would have given up on a long time ago, and I've seen them turn around and accept the grace of God and forgiveness of God. And now you look at you look at some of these people that had a really, really rough background and you see the the joy in their heart, the fullness, the compassion, the mercy. And you could never believe that they were who they were.
Because God has brought about an incredible, miraculous, powerful, transformational change within their lives. And we believe that.
If. You're listening to Bold Steps with Mark job, Mark will be back to continue today's message in a moment, and let me remind you that you can find all of these daily lessons, along with other faith building tools and resources, by visiting Bold Steps. Org. In fact, there's one resource that thousands of listeners are enjoying every week that you can get for free. And Mark, that's the weekly email devotional, The Bold Step or weekly?
That's right, Wayne, the Bold Step.
Or weekly goes out every Monday morning to help our listeners be able to start their week out with Christ at the forefront. Typically, you'll have a devotional, some thoughts from our ministry. And what I love about this as well is that now you have the availability to just listen to it. If you're driving or at work and you can't read it, you can just listen to it. And also we have a Spanish written version of it.
So our desire is just to get you going in the right direction, making sure that you are living for Jesus and taking bold steps all the way.
Yes, and you can sign up for The Bold Stepper weekly by visiting our website bold steps org. Thank you. Mark, let's go back to your message now for today. It's titled Stepping Up to a Clean Heart. Once again, here's Mark Jobe.
But I want to remind you that although God can change and restore at every season, there are certain things during times of being away from God or falling away that we may lose, that we can never recover again. Esau. He knew God. He was raised in the ways of God. But he allowed himself to grow hard towards the things of God. And so he didn't value spiritual things when his heart was hard. And so he sold his inheritance for a bowl of soup. He didn't care about his inheritance. Why?
Because all he cared about was the flesh at the moment. He cared about immediate gratification. If it feels good, I do it. His spiritual inheritance was really important. It was about his destiny. But at the moment, all he cared about was the bowl of soup. I don't care about my inheritance. I'm hungry. If I'm hungry. Now I want to eat it. Give me my bowl of soup. Sure, you can have my inheritance. Later on, when he started getting on track with God, he realized he had given
up his inheritance and he wanted to regain it. And he cried for it and begged for it, but he could not regain what he had lost during that season of time. And that's why, he says, see to it that no one is sexually immoral or godless like Esau. There are many people that grow up in the faith and go through prodigal seasons in their life. And praise God. I've heard so many stories of restoration after being a prodigal. And I know so many of you here. How many
of you know that God rescues the prodigal? How many of you know that? Yeah. Because so many of us have had to go through prodigal seasons. But can I tell you this? I don't believe that everybody has to be a prodigal. I don't believe that everybody has to fall away from God before they really understand the things of God. I don't believe that everybody has to go out there, and I believe there's things that we lose in our prodigal state that sometimes it's hard to regain.
I've heard so many stories of restoration of God, but I've also heard a lot of stories of people losing things they could never regain again. The young man that goes out, and maybe he's raised in the church and raised in the things of God, and he reaches college age and and thinks for a time, I'm away from my family and I'm going to just so my wild oats and do my thing. And I haven't given up on God, but I really don't want to live restricted in my life. I want to have fun with my friends.
And he goes out there and ends up finding a girl that doesn't share his faith and cross his line, sexually, finds out she's pregnant, and next thing you know, he feels compelled to marry her. And and three years down the road, he's a Father, married to a woman who has resentments about the fact that she had to marry him, and who doesn't share his faith. Maybe his dream was always, I want to have a family that that I can pray with my wife and I can raise my kids
the right way, and we share the same values. But he finds himself going to church alone. With a wife that resents him, who can't pray with them, who thinks you're a hypocrite? You say you had faith, you got me pregnant. Here's where we're at, I resent. And so he he restores his heart to God, and he comes back to God and he's worshiping. But he's lost something in his prodigal years that can't be recovered. He's lost
the dream of a godly home. He's lost the dream of a partner that shares the values that they could share together, and the family that they could raise together. Oh, he's restored his soul. But he's lost something that he may beg and cry and call out to God for. But he's lost it. Oh, I'm not saying that God can never reach her. And I'm not saying that her heart could never turn around, but he has to live for a season without someone that's worshiping with him and
living with him and following God because he. During a season of being a prodigal of a heart hearted season, he gave up something that he can't recover quickly. For the young woman, young girl that's raised in church and she knows about the things of God, and she grows up and she has a heart, and it's there and she's always been around. But then. In her 20s, after college, she decides, you know, I'm going to take a break. I don't know, I'm I believe in God, but becomes
hardened somehow. Maybe someone disappointed or maybe someone didn't follow up and maybe she gets a little attitude towards church people or someone hurt her and it was a hypocrite. And now she's 26, 27 and decides, I'm just going to do my thing. And she goes out there and she lives a life that in her eyes is the fun. Life is the is the what all her friends are doing. And everybody else is kind of living this life and
and doing her thing. And she goes to the doctor and wakes up one day and finds that she has a venereal disease. And then starts making her way back to God. But she still has the regrets of crossing the line, of being used, of going down that road. She meets a young man that really wants to follow God and decides, you know, I really want to do things right and goes down that road and they're in premarital counseling, and the day comes where she has to
before it gets too far. She has to sit down and say, listen, there's something you need to know about me. I went through a prodigal season. I went through a bad stage in life. And before we get married, I want you to know I have a venereal disease. Oh, can God restore her heart? Oh, yes, he can restore her heart. But you see, she's lost something that she can never recover again. And in our season of hardness,
of heart, there are things that we may lose. Decisions that we may make, choices that we may have that affect the rest of our life. You know how many women I've talked to here at this altar that with broken weeping hearts, have confessed to abortions? I've had those weeping conversations with women that look me in the face and say, you know what? No one else knows about this. But every year at this month, I think he would be 15 now. I wonder what he'd look like. He'd
be a sophomore in high school. And every year, I feel the incredible guilt of having taken the life of someone. It could have been my son. My daughter. Because at that time, at that season, I just didn't know what I was doing. I was far from God. I wasn't thinking straight. My spiritual life was a mess. You see, God can restore them. But there's things that happen during our hardness of heart that, like Esau, we cry out
for but can never return again. And so my challenge to you today, my exhortation to you, is that you would do a close audit of your heart. My challenge is that you would walk around the fountain of your the spring of your heart right now, and you would examine the spring of your heart and you would ask yourself, Lord, is there any carcass? Is there any carcass here that
is poisoning or contaminating my heart? Is there anything that I need to drag out of the fountain of my life and say, you know what, if I let this stay in my life, it's going to poison me and poison my destiny and poison my relationships. And so, God, I know this can't be there. I don't want it in my life. Lord, I'm willing to take this carcass and get it out of my life. Because I want my destiny to flow in life and not to flow in death.
Well, the Bible teaches it, and it's true. Your heart determines the course of your life. Thank you, Mark, for this message today. It's all about guarding our hearts, isn't it?
It is, Wayne. And it's so easy for us to allow something to pollute the well of our life. And this passage, really? You heard this message, and I'm wondering if some of you feel the conviction of the Holy Spirit that you've allowed a bitter relationship, a undealt with issue in your life, that every time you come into the presence of God, every time you open your Bible, every time you worship, there's a spotlight that the Holy Spirit puts on and deal with it. Deal with it.
If you don't, it's going to continue to pollute the rest of your life. So I want to pause right now and pray with you if you would join me. Father, I pray for that man, that woman right now that feels under conviction that as this message was being preached, you brought something specific, very real, specific, tangible to mind. I pray, father, that you would give them, even right now, today, the boldness to say, God, I will not go one
more day without dealing with this in my life. So give the power to repent, the courage to take a bold step, the willingness to go to the hard places. Father, I thank you for this person listening right now that you want them to live in joy, restore the joy as they deal with this issue that you've been convicting them about for a long time. Father, give them grace and power to move forward. I pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
Amen. Thank you Mark. If you're looking for tools and resources to help you make a heart change, we'd love for you to go online. Explore our website at bird-stamps.org. You'll find videos and articles in our latest Bold Step gift. You know, it's fair to say the past few years have been somewhat unpredictable and filled with a lot of change.
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