Living From a Pure Heart

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Good morning. I want to open this morning by telling you about a conversation that I had with a new Christian. He was very excited. He had recently gone through a lot of failure, a lot of disillusionment, and the Lord had really brought him through that to understand the gospel for the very first time. He was on cloud nine. And my advice to him as I began to disciple him, my advice to him was, Be ready to commit to Jesus because it's going to get harder before it gets easier. It's going to get harder before it gets easier because this adrenaline rush that he had at that moment, it's a huge adrenaline rush where you can see the world differently. You're learning things. You feel like you've just opened your eyes for the first time. understand for real that Jesus has forgiven you. Right? It's such a rush, but eventually that emotion, that adrenaline is going to wear off. That rush is going

to die now, and that guy is gonna hit the wall of real life. There's a way that people live this Christian life where they continually hit walls. They keep hitting the same wall over and over and over again. They get excited for a little bit and then, bam, crisis comes. They get excited and then, bam, rejection comes, disillusionment comes, depression comes. And the way that we're setting ourselves up to live. It doesn't handle those things very well. We hit the wall and we don't know what to do about it. Even seasoned disciples, we hit a rut. We fall back into old habits. We fall into this lull where we forget that we have been given a new heart. Now we know intellectually that we have been given a new heart, but we forget to live that out. Today, we are going to be in 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 22 through 25. And this is a letter from the Apostle Peter to a few churches in the area that are listed in verse 1. So it's written to

all these churches and they've been scattered. And Peter is writing them a letter so that they can circulate it among themselves. And these are people that Peter is writing to, these are people that it says in verse 3 that God has caused to be born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words, these guys are committed Christians. They are walking with Jesus. They have made the sacrifice, they have counted the cost, they've raised their hand and said, I am going to follow Jesus. They have been given a new heart. We see this especially in the prophet of Ezekiel. It's alluded to in the New Testament often, but in Ezekiel 36 it says the Lord is making a prophecy to his people says, I will give you a new heart, a new spirit I will put within you. I'm gonna remove your hard heart and I'm going to inject, I'm gonna give you a

soft heart, one that can obey me. And so this is what the prophet Ezekiel is talking about, he's saying, I want to give you, God wants to give us a new heart. And this right here, this is what we must see whenever we are following Jesus. That at first, when we receive this new heart, when God reaches in, takes our hard heart, pulls it out, and injects a new heart within us, man, it is life-giving. And to To be honest, the first couple of months, even maybe the first couple of years with that is relatively easy. We're kind of running on good emotion and adrenaline and excitement and all these things that are new and it's good. And you've been given this new heart. And just like my Christian friend that I was talking about before, we don't really talk about the fact that they're going to hit a wall, that you and I are going to hit a wall. And when that happens, when the emotions are gone, when the feelings have

dried up, when it's just hard, when you're battling depression, we must intentionally, we must learn how to intentionally engage that new heart that we have been given. Intentionally live from this new heart. This is foundational to Christian living. This is what we call discipleship. This is what we call being sanctified. And as the difficulties come up, the crisis, the rejection, the depression, when all of that comes up, it is much easier for us to just live out of the old heart. So we're living on a new heart, we're doing fine, we're bebopping along, and then bam, life punches us in the face, and it's just easier to revert back to what is familiar. It's easier not to take the chance and to live from that new heart. And so today, as we look at 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 23-25, we're going to be looking at how Peter is talking to this church about living from

a new heart. And what we're going to do is we're going to talk about the difference between living from a new heart and living from an old heart. And And then we're going to also talk about how we continue living with that new heart. So first, we need to identify old heart versus new heart. Then we need to understand how to continue living from that new heart. So let's go to our verses in 1 Peter 1, 22. We're just going to start there. 1 Peter 1, 22, it says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for sincere brotherly love. Now that's not the whole verse, that's just the part. In Peter's letter we're gonna find evidence. We're gonna find indicators of this new heart, right? And we're gonna just, it's gonna see it described new heart living and we're gonna contrast that with old heart living. And the first thing we see here is an order. We see purity, we see that move to obedience of the purity

is coming from obedience. You see I have an underline here. The purity that comes from that obedience is resulting in love. So we have purity from obedience that results in love. And in each, in purity and in obedience and in love, we're going to look at new heart living versus old heart living. And I want to tell you that the first two, purity and obedience, determine the outcome of the third. We're going to look at that a little bit more in depth, but I just want to kind of tell you where we're going. We're going to start with purity. Okay. And it says, it says having purified your souls. And there's actually two ways that someone can purify their souls or at least try to purify their souls. And the first way is to manufacture period. You manufacture purity. And this is, this is out of the old heart. When you're living from the old heart, you're, you want to, you

want to manufacture purity and you can really put quotes around that purity. It's not real purity is manufactured. Um, the way you do that is that you set up standards to live by. And when you achieve those standards, then you can claim purity. You say, okay, well I, I do these things and I don't do these things so that I am pure. This is faulty because any standard that you set up, It can only make you not pure, it can make you more pure than someone else, but it cannot achieve ultimate purity. It cannot make you clean. You see evidence of this, of this kind of one-upmanship, you see evidence of this in the wider culture. In 2010, people were tripping over themselves to see whose carbon footprint could be smaller. Right? That was, you were better than somebody else if your carbon footprint was smaller. 2014, you were better than somebody else if you could, if your selfie had more

celebrities in it or more famous people in it than, than other people's selfies. 2015, it was who could be the first one to accept and celebrate Caitlyn Jenner. In the last four years, it could be who can hate President Donald Trump more. And this last year, who could be more inclusive with their language? All of these in our wider culture were attempts to look more pure than other people. I'm more ahead of the curve. I'm more inclusive. But none of those things, none of those things are purity. All those things are empty standards that can change all the time. And so in 2010, you know, if you had a small carbon footprint, that's great. In 2021, you know, it matters a lot less what your carbon footprint is. That's kind of old news. We don't really talk about that. We don't judge anybody by that anymore. Now it's how inclusive your language is. With our old hearts, if you're living out of that old heart,

then you're going to manufacture purity by setting up these different standards to live by and then achieving those standards, but you can't really get clean that way. So old hearts manufacture purity. New hearts though receive purity. They don't manufacture it, they receive purity. This is new heart living. To receive purity, the only thing that you need to do is you need to hit the reset button in repentance. You need to hit the reset button in repentance. You need to get before the Lord. And in the Bible you see this over and over and over again. Acts 3 it says, repent therefore so that times and refreshing may come from the Lord. 1 John 1 confess your sin. If we confess our sin then he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. What is that? Being cleansed from all unrighteousness. That's purity. That's not

more pure than someone else. It is purity that is received from God Himself. There is no other kind. No other kind of purity that's real. Whenever we have purified our souls, the only way to do that is in confession and repentance. Purity is only received through repentance. And so we can follow the order of the verses again, right? Purity comes from obedience. You're either, that purity, you're either manufacturing that purity, or you are receiving that purity. Now we follow the order of purity, it comes from obedience. So let's look at obedience. Let's look at obedience. Like purity, Obedience also has two types, two kinds of obedience. You can obey in selfishness, you can have kind of a selfish obedience, or you can have a loving obedience. I want to look at selfish obedience first. Living from that old heart. Selfish obedience. What does this look like?

When we read the actual verse of 1 Peter 1, 22, it talks about your obedience to the truth. It says, having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth. To us, that sounds like we're obeying the letter of the law. Because you have done everything you need to do. You have performed well enough to be pure. That's what it looks like. That's kind of what it sounds like to us. But this only makes sense with a manufactured purity. This only makes sense when you are creating your own standards to make your own self pure. Because when you do that, then obeying those standards is the only way that you can justify yourself. Obeying those standards is the only way that you can one-up other people. It's selfish. If you were to take a 15 minute tour of Twitter, you will find your fill of self-justification, people with virtue signaling where they're saying, Oh, I'm, I'm aligned with this.

I'm up on that. It's all kinds of self justification to set up this manufactured purity, right? People are, are just mobbing other people to show how current they are, to show how smart they are, to show how justified their position is, to show how great their candidate is, they're just mobbing over other people. And everybody's kind of clamoring to get to the top. And really, all it is, all it is, is this obedience from an old heart. It's selfish. It doesn't really give life to anybody. It only takes, it's only for themselves, only to justify themselves. But there's another kind of obedience. There is a loving obedience. A lot of obedience is not selfish. However, it can still be a little difficult to detect. And we can see it with children and parents. It's a great example, right? Children can comply with their parents' commands, and that is obedience in a very limited sense.

So if I say, go clean your room, and my child goes to clean the room, there'll be no obedience. They are complying with the command that I have given them. And that's, I'm not sneezing at that, right? I don't hate that. But when children trust their parents, when children understand and believe that their parents have their best interest in heart, their obedience is an expression of love. It doesn't matter if it's taking out the trash, cleaning the room, helping with dinner, whatever. When the children know, when the child knows that their parent loves them, cares for them, wants the best for them, then obeying can become an expression of love. Now, I know many of you are sitting there like, hey, when my children just comply, I'm happy with that. That's true. We're all, I mean, I'm in that boat too. I'm happy when my kids obey, just comply with what I'm asking them to do too.

What I really want for my relationship with my with my children is not just compliance. I want love. Even looking at work relationships, you know, when your boss tells you to do something, when you're a boss and you tell your employee to do something, obviously you want them to do it. But really what's gonna make your business be good and healthy is if you have a good working relationship between boss and employee, right? When obedience is an expression of love, it's a different ballgame. And you can see this. So we start to follow that order a little bit. When your purity is received, right? When you say, okay, I'm not manufacturing my own purity, I'm receiving purity,

then gratitude begins to grow in your heart. And that gratitude leads to obedience. Obedience from a new heart leads to love. It doesn't just lead to compliance, it leads to love. And you look at the phrasing here in 1 Peter. It says, having purified your soul by your obedience to the truth for us, it's your brotherly love. Look, if you have a received purity, if you are obeying in love, what are you obeying? You're obeying a truth for a sincere brotherly love.

And that's a really odd phrasing, even for scripture. It doesn't really talk about it, about truth this way very often. So it is truth for a sincere brotherly love. Different translations have the same idea, but they express it a little differently. So the NIV says it's truth so that you can have sincere love or King James truth unto unfeigned or sincere love the new English translation truth in order to show sincere love so you have truth and love connected there and I want to give you an example so maybe you have truth and how we think of truth like a bullet point set or a set of facts that would be truth where we master it. We master that truth through repetition, through memorization, so that we can get an A on a test. That's bullet point truth. That's not the kind of truth that's talking about here. This is capital T truth. This is Jesus, I am the truth truth. And we don't master this truth. This truth

masters us. We are mastered by that truth. We submit to that truth. When we submit to that truth, the truth that is Jesus. It doesn't result in A's on a test, it results in a sincere, genuine affection for God's family. Let me say that again. When we obey this truth, it leads to a sincere brotherly love. It means that we know the people in our church. We know people that claim Christ and we have a genuine affection. A genuine affection by a genuine affection for God's people comes out when we know that we have received purity from Jesus and we then obey from this loving heart. We are so filled with gratitude that we obey and And when we do that, the more we obey, the more we're going to love God's people. And the more that we love God's people, the more we're going to obey. And what I really want you to see in this first snippet of verses from 1 Peter 1, 22

to 25 is that we have two tracks, right? We have two tracks, living from the old heart and living from the new heart. If we're living from the old heart, purity, remember, is manufactured. Ever-changing standards define what is pure and what isn't. more pure than other people. Obedience in that setting is just about selfishness. It's just about virtue signaling and aligning with yourself with whatever the current standards are. And true love, their true brotherly affection there in that old heart is impossible. It's all faked. It's all put on. Living from that old heart, when you're living with a new heart, your purity is received. Gratitude builds up, spills over into loving obedience, and then you attain a genuine affection for your brothers and sisters in Christ. And so maybe ask yourself a few questions. Can you love people without regard for getting love back? Can

you do something for someone? Can you express love? Or can you say I love you without somebody having to say, I love you back. If you say, I love you, and somebody doesn't say it back to you, are you hurt? If so, why'd you say I love you in the first place? And just trade that out. Instead of saying, I love you, what if you do the dishes for somebody? Do you expect something in return? What if you pay for somebody's coffee? Do you expect them to pay for yours the next time? Loving without regard of getting something back is evidence that you are living from the new heart. Think about justification. Do you tirelessly work to justify yourself at every turn? Are you worried that someone's going to question your decision? Do you play out these nightmare scenarios where somebody says that you sound dumb, look dumb, you don't know what you're doing and then you kind of mount this attack? Are you just waiting to

pounce when somebody disagrees or when somebody doesn't totally love whatever your idea is or whatever clothes you wore that day or whatever choice you made or are you willing to just take I don't know disagreement are you willing to take that without just having to justify everything you did. Some of you have received a new heart a long time ago, but it has been a lot since you've lived out of it. You've been worn down by crisis or rejection, failure, disappointment, depression,

and maybe you barely believe it is possible to live out of a new heart. Let's keep reading. Let's go for the rest of verse 22, because it says, since these things are true, since you have purified your souls by your obedience of the truth for sincere brotherhood love, 22, the end of 22, love one another earnestly from a pure heart. Okay, we'll stop there. That's a command. Before it was all these things that were assumed, but now this is the command to love one another earnestly from a pure heart. Okay. Listen, even when, even when we are loving people out of a new heart, we're still going to hit a wall. We're still going to hit these times when our temptation is going to be to fall back into old heart living. How do we then continue? And this is really the thing that 1 Peter 1, 22 through 25 is trying to tell us is that we must learn how to continue living from a new heart.

It's not enough. It's not enough for us to say, Hey, you know, like I've, I, I accepted Christ. You know, when I was 10, I walked an aisle, I, you know, accepted the VBS, I, whatever, whatever, how you, how you accepted the Lord. That's good. And that's right. And that's holy and amen. And I'm excited for you. However, that's not the last time you're going to grow. That's not the last time you're going to say yes to Jesus. That's not the last thing on your spiritual journey, right? Your spiritual journey just started back then and it should be continuing now. And in order for it to continue now, you must learn how to believe and live out of this new heart. You must understand first that you have a choice. You've been given a new heart But you can still live out of that old heart. Colossians calls this the new man and the old man. We see it all over Scripture

But what are you going to do? How are you going to live out of a new heart? And again, look you've received purity you're obeying in love you're working in that gratitude You have genuine affection for fellow believers. And what 1 Peter is saying is, Okay, since all that is true, put your back into it. Sacrifice for it. Run hard after it. Strain toward it. Not because you're earning it. Not because you somehow can perform your way up there. No. Because it's all been given to you. Because your purity is received. Because your heart has been made new. into it. Express that love to other people. Love one another earnestly and purely. Let me ask you, what are your goals for 2021 and do any of them have to do with loving people better?

Do any of them have to do with taking a chance and seeing what the Lord's going to do? With listening to what the Holy Spirit is prompting you to do and begin to pray about then he goes, what am I going to do next? Are you going to play it safe? Or are you going to love without return on investment? Are you going to love extravagantly? Are you going to sacrifice on behalf of people without expectation of return? Not doing things so that you can get things, but just doing things out of generosity, kindness. What are the things that Jesus is asking you to do to love someone like Jesus loves you. What are the things that Jesus is asking you to do to love someone just like Jesus loves you? Now I want to go back to verse 23. It says to love one another purely earnestly. Why? How can we do this? 23 because, because you have been born again, not a perishable seed, but an imperishable seed,

because you have been born again, because you have been given a new heart. Jesus has caused you to be born again. This reminds us of Nicodemus in John chapter 3, it says, how can I go into my mother's womb again and be born. And what Jesus is trying to help Nicodemus understand is the same thing that 1 Peter is writing about here. It's that it's not about what you can do. It's about something being done for you. It's about you being born again, being reborn, given a new heart, a new life. Loving one another earnestly comes from a pure heart, a new heart, not anything you've earned, something you've been given. However, it is something that you can either neglect or cooperate with. And this is what we're talking about. You have a new heart. Learn how to cooperate with it. How do we do that? Well, if you have been watching any of our sermons, if you have been

in our services at all in 2020, you have heard me talk about vulnerability. 2020 was the year of vulnerability for our church. 2021 is gonna be the year of focus. 2020 was the year of vulnerability. And when I mentioned vulnerability, if all you can do is count all the flaws, all the failures, all the drawbacks of vulnerability, then you are probably living out of an old heart. When I mentioned vulnerability, If you just squirm and nothing else happens, you're not living out of a new heart. We can be vulnerable with one another. We can love one another earnestly, without pretense, without putting on airs. We can love each other, vulnerably, transparently, because our hearts were swapped out. Our old heart was taken, our new heart was given. And how was it given to us? How were we made born? How were we born again? It's not a perishable seed, but an imperishable through the living and abiding

Word of God. We grow through the seed of the living and active Word of God. The living and active Word of God. The Word of God in a very obvious way here, but it's all scripture, the Word of God plants seeds in us. When we sit and read scripture, we pray and ask the Lord to speak and we open up these pages and we listen to the Word of God. That actually plants seeds in our hearts. It changes us slowly, just like putting seeds down in the ground. Some of them are going to come of fruition some aren't, right? But what Jesus says is that His Word doesn't return void. In other words, when that seed goes down and that seed begins to germinate and that seed begins to grow, right? There's going to be fruit from that. The Word of God plants seeds in us and it's just like, it's just like going outside and the sunshine giving you vitamin D. When you just open

yourself up to the word, then seeds will come and plant in your life. And if you can do that, if you can continue to just expose yourself to the word of God, your life will change. There is a great story of a professor, I believe she was a Harvard professor or her name is Rosaria Butterfield, and I believe she was an Ivy League professor, regardless, I don't remember the university offhand. But she was a professor. She was a lesbian. She was living far from God. She wasn't. She had no intentions of becoming a Christian yet. She got a Bible somehow and she started reading. And to tell her, to listen to her tell her own story is amazing. She kept reading and she couldn't stop. She just kept reading and kept reading and kept reading. And the Lord was planting seeds in her heart so that within a couple of months she noticed that she began to change. Her wife at the time took her aside one day and said this point at the Bible said this

thing's changing you this thing's changing and she was scared she didn't want her to change but Rosario Butterfield knew something was going on and it was because she was reading God's word man, the transformative power of just availing yourself to Scripture. It's amazing. I want to read a quote to you from Charles Spurgeon, and I want you to just imagine sowing the seeds of the Word of God in your life. It says, The Word of God will be to you a bulwark and a high tower, a castle of defense against the foe. Oh, see to it that the Word of God is in you, in your very soul, permeating your thoughts and so operating upon your outward life that you, that all may know you to be a true Bible Christian for they perceive it in your words and your deeds. Again, that's Charles Spurgeon talking about a life that is saturated in the Word of God. And so I would encourage you, read it any

way you can. I have been and paid religious professional ministry for over 20 years. I've seen a lot of people walk with the Lord. I've seen a lot of people go wayward or a lot of people hit a wall and maybe, you know, backslide for a couple years. I've seen it. I've seen it in my own life. My own heart has grown cold from time to time. And what I can tell you anecdotally, right, I don't have like scientific data to back this up, but anecdotally what I can tell you is when people are in the Word, when people are reading God's Word consistently, whenever they are listening, they're praying, they're coming before them just say, I want to listen to you, I want to hear you. Those people when they do that are are experiencing a vibrant faith. They are still hitting walls, but they're able to deal with it better. They're able to engage consistently with that new heart that's given to them.

Another way that we do this at South Burleson is that we know engaging that new heart cannot happen in isolation. Right? In verse 22 it talks about the sincere brotherly love. It assumes a family of believers around you. We have life groups. Life groups are there specifically to help you learn how to live with this new heart that you have. Again, if you're interested in life groups, you can go to southburleson.church slash life dash groups. If you want to sign up for one, we have a sign up at the start table. Even if you just want to talk to me about it, I'd be glad to talk to you a little bit about life groups. And there's really nothing magic about a life There's nothing, you know, there's no silver bullet spiritually within a life group. All it is is just people who love you, who are willing to ask you the hard questions and encourage you toward being vulnerable with the Lord.

And when you have that, no matter what you're facing, no matter what walls you hit, you are going to live out of that new heart. You're going to, you're going to live in vibrant Christian faith. This is my prayer for you. It's my prayer for my own children. It's my prayer for my wife and myself and anyone that I call a friend. It is my prayer that we all live out a vibrant faith where we are obeying Jesus. We are listening to him. We are making disciples. We are planting gospel seeds through the word in other people. This is our vision as a church. This is why we exist. We don't exist just to hang out together and talk about how great we are. We exist so that we can worship God together as a family and make disciples. All those gospel seeds that have been planted in other people, He expects us to be the soil that they grow in. He expects us to be the fertilizer.

He expects us to help pull weeds. That is our church. This is how we function together as God plants gospel seeds. Let's pray. Jesus, thank you so much for this morning. We ask that you would help us to plant gospel seeds. We ask that you would help us to live from a new heart and be vulnerable with you. And it's your name that we pray, amen.