Beware That Your Hearts Are Not Deceived

So this morning, we're going to be continuing in our study of Deuteronomy chapter 11, where Moses warns Israel with a warning that's not uncommon in Scripture. The warning is to guard your heart, to beware that your hearts are not deceived. This is a warning we see in many places in Scripture. Specifically here, Moses warns them to guard their hearts against idol worship. And then he teaches them how to avoid this sort of thing. It's one thing to say, Guard your heart. It's another thing to say how to do it. So Moses does instruct us as to how we're to guard our hearts or what needs to be true of us to be able to guard our hearts. And so our hearts will be the focus of our sermon this morning and how to guard them. Our hearts lead us in worship. That's my contention this morning. You all worship. And we don't all worship God the way we should. And so there's work for every one of us in this area.

The question that we have to sort out for ourselves and in our own hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit is, what do we love? What do we worship? What are we cultivating? These are the questions that are before us this morning. My hope is that God will open our eyes to see our own hearts, to see where we've wandered astray, and to help us to keep watch over them diligently and to call us back to him. Would you please stand now as you read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 11, verses 16 through 21. Beware that your hearts are not deceived and that you do not turn away and serve other gods and worship them. For the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its fruit. And you will perish quickly from the good land which the Lord is giving you. You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand.

and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall teach them to your sons, talking to them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates so that your days and the days of your sons may be multiplied in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens remain above the earth. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So our passage begins with these words. Beware that your hearts are not deceived and that you do not turn away and serve other gods and worship them. There's, as I said very briefly in my introduction, but now I want to tease out a little bit more. There's an unbreakable link between our hearts and our worship. Worship is, it's possible to worship without your heart in it, but it's not true worship.

We can see this sort of thing, this sort of worship, this heartless worship taking place throughout Scripture in many places. I want to read to you just two passages that show us that. The first is Isaiah 29, 13. It says, Then the Lord said, Because this people draw near to me with their words and honor me with their lip service, but they've removed their hearts far from me, and their reverence for me consists of tradition learned by rote. This idea that they come and they do all the right stuff. They say all the right stuff. They hear all the right stuff. They claim to believe all the right stuff. But it's hollow. There's no heart in it. It's a car without an engine. It's not going to go anywhere. And also in Matthew 21, verses 12 and 13, it says, And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple.

He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And he said to them, it is written, my house shall be called the house of prayer, but you are making it a robber's den. So what was it that was going on in the temple at that time? Well, clearly they turned this place of worship into a market. And it was a market aimed at the worship of God. Excuse me. They were selling animals for sacrifice. And so they may make the case that they were trying to help and be a blessing to the people. We're making it available for you right here. And God says, Jesus says, no. What you have done is you've corrupted and profaned my house by coming in here and forgetting the worship and turning it into a place of commerce, a place of money making. It wasn't that they weren't supposed to bring those types of animals to worship, to sacrifice. They were.

But the Pharisees, the Jews, the religious people of that time, they should have known better. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have come in with a whip twice to clear out this corruption. Their hearts were not there. They were doing the religious stuff, but where were their hearts? And how is it that they got to that place? These are the questions we're going to ask. Did you think that they knew what they were doing was wrong? Do you think they walked into the house of worship and said, you know what? We really shouldn't be doing this, but there's a dime to be made here. I think we should do it. I don't think that was the case. I think by step by step over time, their hearts were deceived into thinking that what they were doing was actually good and appropriate. And that's what Moses warns the people about here. He says, beware that your hearts are not deceived. Your hearts can be all kinds of things. They can be hard. They can be corrupt.

But he warns here that they not be deceived. And the foundation of deception is that you believe a lie. I believe that what I'm doing is right and good when in point of fact, it is not. And so in both of these instances, in Isaiah 29, as well as Matthew 21, God's people were gathered together in God's house to worship, but they were not worshiping with their hearts. In Matthew, their idolatry was obvious. It was named. They were selling things. But in Isaiah, Their particular idolatry isn't named, but we shouldn't make any mistake in this. There was idolatry going on. Something else had gotten into their hearts. Something else was tugging at their heartstrings. And this debate of where our hearts belong in worship is very old. It's very old, okay? In America, this is a very short example of this.

During the first great awakening, there was a conflict that arose. No Christians nowadays would look at the first great awakening and say, that was bad. They'd look at it and say, that was good. But not everyone at the time thought it was good. Preachers like George Whitefield, who was an Anglican priest, come over from England and was preaching. He was an itinerant preacher. He rode his horse around to these meetings and he preached. There were men who were adamantly opposed to him even preaching and doing that work because he was coming into their parishes, into their churches and speaking to their people. There were pastors who were like, no, that's not allowed. And what he's saying is wrong. They were angry. If they could have brought him up on charges and excommunicated him, they would have done it. But it was a tumultuous time. But the nub of the issue was what is it, what constitutes true worship?

What is appropriate to expect? And the reason that they were frustrated with George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards and guys like him was that those men were intent, by the work of the Holy Spirit, they were intent on captivating and calling men's hearts to worship Jesus Christ. They were not content for people to just come and conform to the traditions. In point of fact, Jonathan Edwards, who's considered the greatest theologian in American history, lost his church in Northampton because he opposed what was called the halfway covenant. Some of you may know what the halfway covenant is. Some of you may not. The halfway covenant was this question. These churches were largely Presbyterian and Paedo-Baptist. So you had a baby that was baptized. And they grew up in the church. And they grew up to adulthood. And then they got married.

in the church. And then they had kids. And then the question was, should those kids be baptized? And we'd all go, well, yeah, I mean, they're children of the church. Their parents were born and raised in the church. Their parents were baptized in the church. Why wouldn't you baptize the children? Well, here's the thing. Those parents never professed faith and never came to the Lord's table. They lived their whole childhood up into adulthood, into having children. They never said, I believe in Jesus Christ. They did all the right stuff. And by all accounts, as we look on the outside appearance of their lives, they were moral people. And they were who populated the church. And then they got married and had kids. And Jonathan Edwards says, there's no heart in the, I mean, I'm really paraphrasing sort of with a broad brush, but he questioned their heart.

Are their hearts following Jesus? They're doing all the stuff, but does their heart love Jesus? Because they've made no profession of faith. They've never come to his table. And so he drew a line and said, I don't think that their children should be baptized. And it wasn't immediate. I mean, this was over the course of years. But he lost his ministry over that. He lost his church. which his wife's, if I'm remembering correctly, his wife's father and grandfather were previously pastored that church. And he stood up, and he reversed what his father-in-law and grandfather had done, and it was the end of it for him. And he ended up a missionary out on the frontier with the Indians, with David Brainerd, his college friend who had been expelled from, was it Princeton or Yale?

Because he said of one of his professors that his professor had no more grace than a chair. And he got expelled for it. Literally, he said that. He got kicked out of school and he ended up being a missionary on the frontier. Because no church could have him because he didn't have a degree. And David Brainerd, though he was a sinner, was a godly man. And so this question of whether or not our hearts are engaged in worship is a real question and it's an old question. My contention to you and Moses' contention to you is that our hearts are inextricably linked to our worship and our hearts have to be the home of the Holy Spirit. They have to love Jesus. You can say all the right stuff. You can do all the right stuff. You can catechize your children. You can get them baptized. You can bring them to church every time the door is open. If your heart's not there, if your heart's not united to Jesus Christ,

You're deceived and you have an idol. That's the case that Moses is making here. And so he says, you need to be aware that your hearts are not deceived, that you not be like those whom Isaiah prophesied about or those who were trading in the temple. So true worship is to be heart-filled. In John 4, Verses 23 and 24, Jesus said, an hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. For such people, the Father seeks to be his worshipers. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. And again, listen to this prayer, David's prayer toward the end of his life in 1 Chronicles 29. He says, since I know, oh my God, that you try the heart and delight in uprightness, I, in the integrity of my heart, have willingly offered all these things. So now with joy, I have seen your people who are present here make their offerings willingly. This is David's prayer of thanksgiving as they've called for all of the supplies to build the temple. And so this is his prayer. As he's ending and as Solomon's taking over, this is his prayer. And he's talking about his heart and he prays for the hearts of the people. Going on, he says,

O Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, our fathers, preserve this forever in the intentions of the heart of your people and direct their heart to you. And give to my son Solomon a perfect heart to keep your commandments, your testimonies, and your statutes, to do all of them, and to build the temple for which I have made provision. Then David said to all the assembly, Now bless the Lord your God. And all the assembly, all the... all the assembly blessed the Lord, the God of their fathers, and bowed low and did homage to the Lord and to the king. And so this is a picture both of David's prayer concerning his own heart, its disposition toward the Lord, the people's heart that they would remember and their hearts would be inclined toward the Lord, and for his son's heart, the new king, that he would be inclined toward the Lord. And it says that after this, he blessed the people and they all bowed low and they did homage, they worshiped.

And so our hearts have to be captivated by and in league with Jesus Christ. And I will tell you, that is far more important than whether you're Reformed. You have questions about Reformed theology? That's fine. We can talk about them. That's great. The real question is, what's got your heart? What do you love? Who do you love? God's people are at their best when they are worshiping God with their whole hearts. That is what God wants from us. It is what David prays for himself and for the people. The Lord wants our hearts to be open to him and consequently closed to everything else that leads us astray. And so Moses warns them not to be deceived, which means that God's people are susceptible to thinking they're worshiping God rightly when they aren't. And that's what they have to be on guard against. And not just them, but us.

Idolatry is a strange concept because when you think of idolatry or false gods, you may be inclined to think of little statues, little Buddhas or things like that. And I don't know that any of you have any of that stuff. I don't think you do. You all would be like, we're Christians, we don't have that kind of stuff. You might think of idolatry as having a false view of God, and so you might look at the other major world religions and say, I'm not a Jew. I'm not a Muslim. I don't worship a false god. Interestingly, on this passage, in his sermon, Calvin lumps the Jews, the Turks, which are the Muslims, and the Papists, the Catholics, all together. And is not, I mean, he's opposed to them. He calls them silly infidels a number of times. But he puts them all together as having a false god, an idol, and that the adherence to those religions their hearts are turned away. They are deceived. And you might wanna distinguish in those groups to varying degrees, the deception of their hearts. You might on the one end say, those who follow Muhammad, they're the most deceived. And the Jews are deceived, but less deceived. They're closer to us. And the Catholics, I'm not sure, are deceived in a way that's damnable.

But what you have to be careful of, my point is not to argue to you the nuances of how you should organize that and what similarities you should see. My point is that if your mind and your heart wants to categorize those things and downgrade the deceptions, you're putting yourself in danger because you're saying, well, it's not that dangerous. It's not that dangerous. We don't need to be on guard as much. But Moses calls us to be on guard. Beware that your hearts are not deceived. And so to actively be on guard, to actually be keeping watch, you have to believe, actually believe there's a real threat. There's a real danger. And so while I'm not primarily talking to you in our context, I don't know that little Buddhas are really the problem. And I don't know that Islam and...

and Judaism are actually the thing that you're trying to mix in with the worship of the true God, Roman Catholicism, you probably have a soft spot for because you know some Roman Catholics and you think they're nice people. And they may be nice people, but they don't believe the truth. They have a false view of God at a number of crucial points. So let's say that you're with me and you say, yeah, I'm against all that stuff. Spit it out of my mouth, don't like that. Is there still a danger? Is there still yet another form of idolatry? that you're susceptible to? Or have you cleared the danger? There's still idolatry that you may have in your heart. An idol is something that takes the place of God, something that demands your affections, something that you care about. It doesn't walk around and say, I'm a God and I think you should worship me instead of the Lord Jesus Christ. They don't present that way.

Satan's not so foolish in his temptations of us. Our idols come to us secretly. They come in through deception. They come and they lay for a while and then grow to life later. And they don't even claim to be a God. They don't even claim to demand our worship. They're just things we care about. What could it be? It could be your wealth. It could be your health. It could be your politics. It could be your theological pride, or you wouldn't call it your theological pride, theological accuracy. If you like winced when I said I care more about you loving Jesus than being reformed, if you winced, then the blow landed. Do you care about the logistics of the week and the schedule? Do you care about your work? Do you care more about sports? Do you care more about what's going on in social media? What has your heart? What do you love? What do you care about?

What do you worry about? What do you attend to? What's on your mind on Sunday mornings when you're coming to worship? What makes you late? Now, maybe little kids that make you late. And I'm not saying you can't have an idol of your children or your family. But what was it that you cared about? What is it that causes you to fight with your spouse when they're distracting you from what is it? These are the questions. that we should be asking ourselves. These are the questions that one who's guarding their heart has to know the answer to for themselves so they know where the danger lies. Have you ever thought about when we stand before God, what it'll be like? It'll be a handful of things all at once, and it's kind of hard for us to wrap our minds all the way around it. It will be glorious. It will be fearful and awesome. You know what else will be true when you stand before God?

There will not be anything else on your mind. None of the stuff you think about and get distracted about so easily, you aren't going to care one little bit. I don't care how much you care about it right now. Your spouse, you will not be thinking about your spouse when you stand before the judgment seat of God. You will not be thinking about your children. You will not be thinking about your health or your 401k or America's politics or what's going on on X. it will be like so far away. Because at that point then, your heart will be fully engaged in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that will be true of the believer as well as the unbeliever. The one with joy and anticipation and thanksgiving, the other one calling out for the mountains to fall on them, to hide them from the fury of God. But make no mistake, their hearts will be engaged at that point. They will know what's going on.

And yet we live in this world where that level of attention, we don't pay it to anything. You guys heard the sirens this last week for the tornadoes, warnings or watches. I never can keep straight a warning and a watch. But the buzzers went off. They went off down at our house. And there was a tornado that went through Bloomington right by our ascending church. It kind of just went right over. And it tends to take, this isn't the first time that the tornadoes travels this route. They had straight winds down there 10 years ago, tore a bunch of stuff up. Now they've got tornadoes that have tucked down in various places. What I wonder was how, at what point did people stop paying attention to what was going, like what the social media was saying about the tornado, and when they actually went and got under their staircase or when they actually prayed? I'm using it as an example to say, how close does the danger have to get?

before you're willing to set aside the other thing and pay attention to it? When is your heart engaged in it? In that instance, it would be fear. I'm afraid the tornado is going to pick my house up with me in it and the people I love and kill us. And so the idea that our hearts are readily and freely engaged solely in the worship of God is a foolish thing to think. When you look at how hard in every other area of life it is to get your heart even a little inclined in the right things or the scary things to the point of doing something about it or not doing something harmful. This is how we should approach worship. We should come here with our hearts as fully engaged. It should be our aim to come here with our hearts as fully engaged as they will be when we stand before Jesus Christ. That's how singularly focused our minds should be and our hearts should be. And so here's the thing.

You all just heard what I said. Some of you will remember it. At your dinner table tonight, say, what did Pastor Dave say that time he told us we had to remember that thing? I'm not gonna say it again. And don't tell anybody, but just see if you were listening. See if your spouse or your kids were listening. I realize that our worship service has many distractions, but our hearts ought to be focused, so focused on the Lord Jesus Christ and on his worship that we don't even notice those things. Now I realize some of you have your little kids and you're like, are you telling me that I'm supposed to not notice the crying baby on my lap? No, I'm not. I'm telling all the people around you not to notice the crying baby on their lap. That actually when you're distracted and like, oh, well, maybe I need to blow my nose and I may need a little caffeine and my shoe's untied and do I have any gum and all that stuff, you're distracted. You shouldn't be distracted.

Your heart should be on guard against that. You should learn to see those sorts of things as little tiny temptations from Satan to pull your attention away from the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's hard for me, as I'm saying this, to even think, like, is it even possible? Like, if I had to give myself a grade, like, could I get 20% of the way there? I'm not trying to, I don't think I can get out of like above 50%, but like, could I even get 20% of the way there? If I could, it would be an improvement. It's how it feels to me. And I think to many of us. But what is it that we're called to do? If our hearts are actually linked to our worship and we realize that at some point we're going to worship God and it's going to be so different than how we are now, shouldn't we be aspiring to that and guarding our hearts against the distractions now with all diligence?

Proverbs tells us, keep watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Our heart is this, they're these deceptive, slippery things that you can't get a hold of. On my fishing trip up in the Boundary Waters this last summer, I caught a nice walleye. Nice walleye. Fun to catch. And they have teeth, so you can't grab their mouth. You know? And so I've got a hold of the thing. And he told me, squeeze it tight. And it's like that big around, you know? So I got big hands. I'm squeezing it tight. And I get my pliers out to take the hook out. And I get the hook out. And I mean, the minute that hook popped, it's like this fish has been caught before. The minute that hook came out, that fish started doing like, and right out of my hands, right back into the water.

And it's like if someone was watching, it just would have been a goof reel because it's like I grabbed like three times and it was just catch, catch, catch, gone. And that's our hearts. That's what our hearts are like. It's like you to keep watch over. It's like the most naughty little two-year-old you can imagine. Your heart is so much harder to get a hold of than that kid. And it's wicked, leading you astray. And so we have work to do. Moses' warning here. Beware that your hearts are not deceived. It's like a lifetime of work. that's fraught with distractions and frustrations and discouragements when you start to see what your heart's like, how resistant it is, how slippery it is, how deceitful it is. But I'm only telling you what Scripture tells you about your heart, that it's deceitful and desperately sick. Have you ever heard people say, well, you meant well. I didn't mean for that to happen. And it's like when you start thinking about our hearts like this, which is to say biblically, all of a sudden you're like, no, you didn't mean well.

No, I didn't mean well. Even that, I'm making an excuse for my heart to shirk, to slip out of the judgment, to get past the guard. Scripture doesn't speak in that way about our hearts. And so Moses calls us to guard our hearts, to beware that our hearts are not deceived. And this is quite the undertaking. And as if it weren't hard enough, he then says, Beware of your hearts that they're not deceived that you don't turn away and worship and serve other gods or the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its fruit and you will perish quickly from the good land which the Lord God is giving you. So Moses argues in a way that says, if you don't do this stuff, if you don't guard your hearts, your welfare hangs in the balance of it. It's not inconsequential. It's very consequential.

This work. Do you think they believed that the Lord would actually take this land away from them? I don't think they believed that the Lord would take this land away from them. Because I know the sinfulness of my own heart, which is to say that when I get things, I tend to take credit for them myself and not give glory to God for having given it to me. And then I think I'll just keep hold of it. Having gotten it myself, I'll just keep hold of it myself. And so when you get a warning that says, I'm going to take that away from you, you're like, no, I don't think you'll do that. Because I don't think you can do that. And I don't think you would do that.

So the question comes to us then, did God take the land away from them? Yes. He sent them off into captivity. He took the land away from them because they didn't do this thing that they were warned to do before any of it started. And so this examination, this guarding is a deep examination. We shouldn't be satisfied with a superficial examination of our hearts where we come away saying, yeah, I'm a sinner. Yeah, I've done wrong. Yeah, I shouldn't do that. Yeah, I'm working on it. These are the things we say to ourselves when we say to other people. We get frustrated when other people come back to us and they say, no, no, I don't think that's quite good enough. If we find some sort of small fault or failure, some sin in our lives, we should make it our business to probe deeper into our hearts to find out what they contain. I will tell you, your heart is not readily open to divulge its passions.

That's part of the deception is that your heart, because of how corrupt and wicked you are, it will hide its intentions from you. You won't know it. Someone else might know it because they're not living in it. But your heart will hide from your examination. And so this guarding is not accepting the answer that first comes. Well, I didn't mean to do that. Well, I shouldn't do that again. Well, I used to be a lot worse. You have to ask yourself, is that thing I'm telling myself right now going to pass muster when I stand in the glory of God at his judgment seat? Is he going to say, well, yeah, you were trying. I mean, what's the implication of trying? Trying implies that you can do something. You can save yourself if you try hard enough. But we're Protestants. We don't believe that. We believe that Jesus died for sinners and that he paid it all, that he saved us from all of the guilt and all of the judgment and all of the condemnation and all of the

the wrath that we deserve, and that our efforts are useless in that economy. So our hope is that Jesus Christ will cover our sins, all of them. And yet... We live and we make excuses about our behavior. We minimize. We downgrade. We say, it's not that big of a deal. I didn't mean to do it. Well, you can't expect more of that from me. I'm tired. I'm sick. I've been trying so long. We don't even think about it when we say these things. We believe these things. They're deceptions. They're deceptions of our heart. And I think part of the reason we want to believe those deceptions is because it's like a blanket on a cold morning. And it's like you're just fighting to hold on to that hope that it won't be as bad.

But if the blanket's pulled off, we're like, well, now I'm cold and I'm without covering. Before God. And what it means to be a Christian is that if your heart is inclined toward him, if you've believed in your heart and confessed with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, you will be saved. Laid as bare as I've just described, God will save you. and cover you with his righteousness, not your own righteousness, but his righteousness. And that's why Paul says, if I'm going to boast, I'll boast about my failings. I'll boast about my weaknesses. I will proclaim my sins, my shortcomings to you so that Jesus Christ is magnified because he saved me and I know it in my heart. And so this work of examination, of guarding, of rooting out deception, it is the staple of the Christian life. The goal, your goal ought to be as a Christian to know your heart so well that when someone comes to you and tells you that they see a sin in your life, that you can articulate more thoroughly and more deeply than anyone else can why you did that thing, what was going on in your heart.

Well, I thought this. Well, I wanted that. Well, then I was frustrated about this thing. Well, then I was tired and I made an excuse and I believed it. And look at this whole just big smorgasbord of failures and sins. And who will set me free from the body of this death? That's what Paul asks at the end of Romans 7 after he's gone through this misery of self-examination. I don't do the thing that I'm supposed to do. I acknowledge what is good and then I don't do it. I do the thing I'm not supposed to do, and I know I'm not supposed to do it, but my heart wants to do it, my flesh wants it, and then I do it, and then I feel miserable, and then it's like, ah! And he exclaims, who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through the Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 8.1. Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those. Right? That's the Christian life. It's guarding your heart. It's getting to know. It's being a heart doctor, your own heart doctor, to learn what you're like and who you are.

and you won't find commendable things in there. If you're finding good things in yourself, we're still believing lies. Our hearts are wicked. They really are. And I realize some of you might be offended at me saying, there's nothing good in you. But there's really nothing good in you. There's good things in Jesus Christ. He is good itself. He is the definition of it. We are not. And however much he works in us and however much good he produces in us, it's still not us who's doing it. It's him who's doing it. It's the new man, the inner man, being born and coming to life while the older man fades away. We don't get any of the credit and any of the glory at any point in our lives. It all belongs to Jesus. And it's our place as Christians to remember that and to acknowledge that and to thank him for the good things he does in our life and not steal away his glory.

because our hearts have been deceived. And so we have a big task in front of us. How do we do it? You ever been made to go do something, sent out to do something you really don't know how to do? Maybe you got sent into a sporting game that you didn't know the rules. Maybe you got made to stand up in class and teach, and you were like, you don't know what we're talking about. You could be feeling that pressure right now. You could be feeling a lot of pressure to guard your heart, to beware, to take these things seriously and just have this knot forming in your stomach as to how am I supposed to do it? Here's how you do it. I'm gonna read this rest of the passage to you and then I wanna talk about it a little bit. You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road and when you lie down and when you rise up.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates so that your days and the days of your sons may be multiplied on the land which the Lord swore to your fathers to give to them as long as the heavens remain above the earth. Here's my contention. Everything I've just laid out to you, it's impossible to do, to just eradicate bad stuff. The Christian life is a life of self-denial, but it is not only a life of self-denial. A Christian life is actually meant to be a fruitful life. It's meant to be a life of cultivation, okay? How do I examine my heart? How do I see and name and guard against all of this corruption and all of this wickedness? Moses tells us, take these words of mine and impress them on your heart and on your soul, okay? Let me put it a different way. You cannot keep watch over your heart if you are not a student of God's word, okay? We're often pushing you to,

to read your Bibles. Read your Bibles. There is much more to this than simply spending 10 or 15 or 30 minutes a day reading Scripture. Your goal as a Christian ought to be to whenever something happens in your life, in our society, with your health, wherever it is, Your first reaction, that goal we're aiming for is my first reaction will be a biblical response to that. And biblical responses are often surprising. Let's say that you get in a car accident. Someone runs into you. It's their fault. What's the natural response? Anger? Probably fear at first, like, you know, because you're like, oh, what happened? And then you're angry. Is that a biblical response? Okay, no.

What is a biblical response? I don't know. That's the question, right? The biblical response is to go and see if the other person's okay. It's not to worry about your car or your schedule. It's to go see if the other person's okay. That's not a mystery to anyone, right? Like that makes sense. It's to love and to care for someone and to realize that you as a Christian ought to be concerned about them. We'll sort out the car and all that other stuff. Yeah, all that has to be dealt with. But your first response as a Christian ought to be concerned for your neighbor. Are you okay? What can I do for you? But our anger gets in the way of it. We don't respond that way. And it's a simple example and it's a simple response. But man, our hearts don't like it. The goal is in being able to diagnose your heart well is to have steeped yourself in scripture and in God's word such that

Whenever something's happening, that is the filter you put on. It's like you're blind, and then you open your eyes, and you have this filter, and it's a biblical filter. It's the Bible. And you see everything that goes on through that lens. There are lots of other lenses you can put on and that our hearts want you to put on. But as a Christian, that's what you're supposed to be aiming at. That when this happens, I don't remember who it was. Was it Bunyan that they said he just bled the Bible? Like if you caught him, he would just bleed the Bible. His language was just so much of it was scripture. And you didn't know it unless you also knew scripture to realize this guy is constantly saying things the Bible says. Like phrases and sections. Not just like teaching the concept, but literally using the words. So that's the diagnostic question that you should ask your heart. When something happens, something bad, Something scary. How do you process it? Do you process it politically? Do you process it familially? What's this gonna mean for my family? Do you process it economically? How much is this gonna cost me? Do you process it personally? How much of an inconvenience is this going to be to me? Or do you process it scripturally? I'm a Christian. What is necessary for me in this moment? As Christians, we ought to process spiritually. It's not that there aren't implications for any of the other things I've mentioned.

But as Christians, our first priority ought to be to process these things scripturally. Then we can work our way through these other considerations. But this is only possible if we have God's word in our hearts. And so I mean to tell you that you ought to be reading your Bible every day. And if you're not reading your Bible every day, there is no excuse. And I realize that many of us don't read our Bible every day. And I realize still yet a number of many of us don't read our Bible even often. And it's such a failure. It's so shameful. And it really is shameful. And it's something I struggle with. So I'm not here just to tell you you're wrong, but I am here to tell you you're wrong along with me. And there's no excuse for it. And simply reading your Bible a little bit is still yet not sufficient. I would commend to you that you should be reading much more than that. You should be like...

how do I get a Christian worldview, a Christian framework, a Christian filter that is so all-encompassing that whatever happens in my life, if I'm looking this way, if I'm looking that way, like wherever I look, it's like I'm still looking through a biblical lens. How do I get that? Well, you're not gonna get it by having a 15-minute devotion three times a week. You just won't get there. You'll never get there. You will die having never gotten there. And your heart will be susceptible to more lies because you didn't guard it. Part of the way you guard your heart is you get this stuff into your head and into your heart. You impress it on your heart, okay? I didn't squeeze that fish tight enough. I didn't impress my fingers on it enough to keep a hold of it. But that's what we're doing is we're taking scripture and we're pressing it onto our hearts and conforming our hearts to it, that slimy thing. We are gonna get scripture's hooks into it. That's the goal.

So what do you need to do? You need to read the Bible. You need to pray. You need to have devotions. You do, over the course of your life, you actually do need to learn theology. You do need to learn theology. And there are hard theologies that I would not recommend to you reading. There are ones that are very accessible and are a good place for you to start, and I'd recommend you start with them. Get Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. Get R.C. Sproul's Everybody's a Theologian. Pick up Matthew Henry's commentary and read it for devotions. If you want the simplest way to have devotions, He uses the King James. Just get yourself the set of Matthew Henry's six volume set of his commentaries. And he goes section by section. And just give up reading a whole chapter of scripture and just read. He'll put the section and then he'll have a few pages of comments. Just read that every day. Just read one section of it. Just every day. You will not read your Bible that way in a year. Not even close. The volumes, it's like that much of a book. So it's a book that's that big. But read it.

and think about it and decide whether you agree with him. There are points at which I don't agree with Matthew Henry. I'm not going to go into what they are right now. Read those things. You can get to the point where you can read Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion. I think every one of you men, if you're going to lead your family, should have read that. You should read it. That's about this big. It's two books. Very systematic. It's giving you a framework for how to understand and where to hang. the things you read in scripture. You really do need to do this stuff. Well, I'm just not a reader. Then that's a failure. That's a failure. How do you learn? I learn by doing. Well, how are you going to learn what God has to say? He gave us a book. He gave us a book. And so it's not sufficient for you to say, I'm not a reader. You should do that. And you should go, you know, my heart, that slippery, slimy thing.

has convinced me that the fact that I don't naturally like to read is a sufficient reason to let Satan's lies come live in my heart. You should read. You should have questions. You should wear Eric and me and your elders out with your questions. And some of you do. And sometimes you ask questions and I'm like, I don't know. Not everything is knowable, but this ought to be your heart's desire. This is how you keep watch over your heart. Impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul. Bind them as a sign on your hand and frontals on your forehead. Teach them to your sons when you're walking and sitting and rising up and lying down. He's giving us a life's mission, a life's calling. And it will take a lifetime to do it. In saying what I've said so far, get Matthew Henry's commentaries. They're very understandable. The English is not hard. Calvin's is a little harder.

There's more complex things yet still that you can read later if you want to. But you ought to not be intimidated by these things. You ought to trust God that he can actually get this stuff into your heart. That's where it belongs. And equip you to do what Moses calls us to do here, which is to beware of our hearts that they not be deceived. You don't have to be a pastor to be theological. And I will tell you that in life, many times we get interested in theological things when it suits us. When does everyone want to finally decide if they're paid over Credo Baptist? Everyone who's not married, they're like, oh, I'm this and I'm that and I know why because, you know. When do they find out? You guys tell me this stuff and I'm like, oh, maybe you are. I mean, I'm not saying you're not. I'm just saying, we'll see. What's your spouse? You sort these things out. When you finally figure it out is when you have a baby.

And now you have to make a decision. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, I want to understand this stuff. Well, I hate to tell you, but if you want to understand the actual arguments regarding paedo and credo baptism, you're going to have to learn about this thing called covenant theology. And there isn't one little short pamphlet that's going to explain that to you. It's a little bit more of a study. It takes a little bit more time. It's interesting. And it even still doesn't resolve all of your questions irrefutably. It's a life's pursuit. And so we should be reading our Bibles. We should be praying. We should be studying his word. We should be talking about it with people, our family. So that when whatever happens in our lives, our hearts cry. Remember that first pass at it is in line with Psalm 124 verse eight. Our help is in the name of the Lord. Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. That's the exclamation of a heart that is well conformed to the word of God.

God's blessings, Moses tells us, they attend this pursuit. Land and length of days attend this pursuit. Destruction is the end of all who refuse this call. And so this exhortation is an exhortation toward the fundamentals of the Christian life and what you're to pass on to your children. Isn't it interesting that sometimes we would want to see our kids' hearts guarded? We care more about that than we do about our own. Do you parents ever feel that? You're like, well... I've found my way into my 30s or 40s or 50s, but I really don't want my kids to be where I'm at when they're my age. I care more that they don't consume the sorts of things that I did consume or do consume still. We care more about their hearts than we do about our own hearts. But what will we have to pass on to them that we haven't seen fit to prioritize in our life? How can we pass that on to them? You should read the Bible. You should learn these things. You should, you should, you should. But I'm...

I don't like to read. It doesn't sound too convincing when we say it that way, does it? It sounds kind of pathetic. And that's because it is. It is pathetic. We make pathetic excuses. And so it's helpful to say them out loud where other people can hear them and be like, that's pathetic. We shouldn't do that. I'm not going to continue to say that or let you say that. We should do something different. Now, my point in bringing that up was not to say, not only to expose our hypocrisy, but to say actually God giving you kids that you care about and love and want to protect is actually his kindness. Your kids will actually cause you to grow in godliness because you don't want them exposed to the things that you're content for yourself to be exposed to. And that's his kindness to you, is that he gives you people you care about and feel more responsible for overseeing their spiritual well-being than perhaps you do yourself.

And so my exhortation to you is not just with regard to children, but with your whole life. Fill your life with responsibilities that call you to be a better Christian. Fill your life with responsibilities of serving God. And you'll be well on your way to growing in your Christian walk and in guarding your heart. When scripture tells us that it's good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth, he's giving us very clear instructions about what young men should be spending their time doing. Busy as you can be. Busy as you can be. Now, you get married and you have a wife and kids, you'll be busy and you can't neglect that stuff either. But busy is a great help to fighting against sin. Busy and tired. Busy during the day, tired at night. It really helps. Oh, no, I didn't see that thing on X. I was working. It's a really sweet kindness of God for you to be so busy you can't see straight and to be asleep before your head hits the pillow at night. Let's pray.