Dennis Tuuri

# Spiritual Gifts, Part Seven: The Renewed Heart

Hear my cry, thy love renewing. We come to the last in a series of sermons on spiritual gifts. And this really isn’t so much on spiritual gifts. This is upon conditions of our heart relative to these gifts. And the sermon text today, although this is more of a topical sermon, is Romans 10, verses 8-11. So please stand for the reading of God’s word.

**Romans 10:8-11**

But what does it say? The word is near you in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith which we preach. That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on him will not be put to shame.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we pray that you would help us to meditate upon it today and throughout this week. Bless us, Lord God, as we seek you in the context of this service. Indeed, renew your love with us, Lord God, and may our love be renewed to you. Place us at the center of our being in Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So place God at the center of our being. This is really clearly a reflection of the faith of St. Patrick in what we just sang—St. Patrick’s Breastplate, so-called. This is a song based upon St. Patrick’s Confession, which we have. St. Patrick, of course, was the one who went back to those who had killed him, taken him captive, and made a slave out of him. And he goes back after he’s gotten away and becomes a great saint, then, to convert Ireland. And so this is his confession as he’s heading back to work with these people. This is his relationship with God put into words and then versified and done some things with in terms of our reading of it.

But you know, clearly the song—that wonderful St. Patrick’s Day song—is an indication that indeed God is at the center of his heart because he knows that we are at the center of God’s heart. And he knows that everything is mediated to him—everything. And he talks about, you know, the starlit skies, the heavens, the earth, the rocks—all of creation. We have relationship to it. It’s mediated to us through our union with Jesus Christ, who made these things. And he made them to reflect his glory. And he made them ultimately that we might live in the context of them and be affirmed that we have nothing to fear from the lightning or the stars or ships in water and rocks in water, but rather that all these things are being mediated to us through the great love of God that we might love him in response.

And then the central verse—the breakoff, next to last verse. The reason for this is because we’re united to Christ and all of our lives are to be hid in the Lord Jesus Christ. United to him, understanding everything that happens to us, even the physical universe, in relationship to the love of God for us in Christ. That we are at the center of God’s heart in Christ. And we’re to make him the center of our hearts in response to that.

Now, what does this have to do with spiritual gifts? You know, I was thinking as we were singing that the liturgy is kind of like a dance. And I’m going to warn against dead formalism here in a couple of minutes. But so the liturgy is kind of like a dance. It’s like a waltz. God says something to us. He calls us to worship. We respond at confessing our sins. He assures us or singing a praise. Then he calls us to confess. We confess. He assures us we’re forgiven. We respond in praise. It’s a dance. And in this dance, there’s a leader and a follower. And the leader is God and the follower is the church.

And so this is very much like, you know, a couple dancing a waltz. And the husband leads the wife and she’s with him. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever learned how to waltz, but when you’re learning how to waltz, it’s not a love thing. It’s a drill thing. And so your instructor is telling you, do this, put this foot here, and you’ve got your partner. Sometimes you’re not with your partner, but you know, you’re learning how to do the waltz. And that’s fine. But if in the middle of your waltzing with your spouse, with your lover, and the one who loves you, if you were to be getting these instructions all the time, it just isn’t the waltz then, right? It’s something else. And so we try not to do that.

But on the other hand, if all you’ve done is learn the routine and all you’re doing in the waltz is going through the motions—is what we say, right? And you’re not looking at your wife or your husband in the eyes and loving them and dancing with them. Right now, you’re kind of, even though you might have a partner there, it’s as if you’re dancing alone out there on the floor. I don’t want us to come to worship, engage in this waltz, and somehow be dancing by ourselves. What we want is to have God at the center of our being.

And so that’s why I’ve decided to talk about this. Spiritual gifts, the graces of God given to minister to the body, can be done the same way. You know the steps. You’re going through the motions, but there’s no love. There’s no relationship with Christ and his body that really is driving the works of service that may be quite excellent and good and useful. And yet you may not, you know, be in love with Christ and his people and not be motivated by that.

In this seventh talk, we’re returning to Romans. Remember we said when we started this series with Romans that kind of the thrust or the focus of the Romans section on spiritual gifts in chapter 12 is victory accomplished through love, right? And it’s the way we go about doing these things. So I’m kind of returning to that, but indirectly what I’m going to talk about is your relationship to God. And you know the implication is that as you go about—we already have people ministering in new ways, offering to do new things at the church. So spiritual gifts is working its way through. We’re looking at our ministries, etc., in maybe a little bit different way. We’re trying to improve them, etc. But most of all what we need to do to make ourselves a more effective church is to improve our love. Our love for God and, as a result of that, our love for one another. And so that’s why I’m addressing this particular issue.

Now there’s a quote by Jonathan Edwards relative to spiritual gifts I wanted to read here that kind of says some of what I’m trying to get across here. Let me read from Jonathan Edwards. He says: “Gifts of the spirit are excellent things, but they are not things which are inherent in the nature as the grace as true grace and holiness are. Gifts of the spirit are as it were precious jewels which a man carries about him. But true grace in the heart is as it were the preciousness of the heart by which the soul itself becomes a precious jewel.”

So gifts are like jewels hung around our necks. But there’s this internal preciousness of the heart that’s a response to the grace of the spirit to us and his love for us and our love for him.

“The spirit of God may produce effects on many things to which he does not communicate himself. By communicate meaning union, not just speaking, communicate himself. So the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, but not so as to impart himself to the waters, right? Or blows through the trees or whatever it is. The spirit of God may move and have effects on things and yet not really communicate in the same way as he does with us.

But when the spirit by his ordinary influences bestows saving grace upon his people, he therein imparts himself to the soul. Yeah. Grace is as it were the holy nature of God imparted to the soul.”

So spiritual gifts are great, but they can be like jewels. They are sort of like jewels. They’re things you do, things that improve things. Great. But if we do all of that and we don’t recognize in our heart our relationship to God through the spirit, if we don’t focus on who we are at the center, why we are doing these things and why they’re reflected in how we do them—either in a loving way or not—then you know we’re a clanging gong, right? That’s what Paul says in First Corinthians. We’re trying to prove something to God through our great ministry. Maybe we’re trying to prove something to ourselves, making ourselves feel better about ourselves. Maybe we’re trying to prove something to other people so they’ll like us better and think we’re better Christians. But if that’s the ultimate motivation, it’s an error.

The ultimate motivation is that God has loved us and our response to him is love. I talk a lot about gospel and response, right? But what is the goal of our instruction according to Paul’s writing to Timothy? The goal of our instruction, he says, is love from a pure heart. We instruct one another in the things of God’s word. The gospel is preached to us. We preach the gospel to one another—the good news. But the goal of that, the proper response, is not obedience to law. I mean, it is. We want to respond by doing what God wants us to do. But if we think that response is primarily duty rather than love that drives duty, we’re mixed up.

I hope this doesn’t confuse you. If it does, you know, we’ll try to keep talking about it and make it clear. But the response to the gospel is to be love on the part of those who are the recipients of the gospel. First Timothy and all kinds of other texts make that quite clear. And if all we do is redefine love as duty and obedience, we’ve missed the point. We’ve missed the point. Duty and obedience flow out of a love relationship. It doesn’t, you know, define, it doesn’t replace it.

We can’t, you know, what’s Islam? Islam, which began as, as I understand it, as a perversion of Christianity—Muhammad was originally a Christian, so they say. Peter Leithart has written about this. But what is it all about? It’s about submission. The ultimate response of Islamic people to Allah is submission. Slavish submission. And that’s not what the Bible teaches. It does teach submission, but submission is a love response to the great love that God has showered upon us.

So the proper response to the gospel, the proper goal of our instruction today, is your response and my response with love from a pure heart. Yes, obedience. Yes, a trust in God and a desire to follow him, which we would say is then submission, but ultimately it’s love.

If you try in your marriage relationship to simply make it all about law and make it about duty, that’s not good. When women occupy the Jesus role in submitting to their husbands—as Tim Keller’s wife wrote so well, I think, in her chapter of his book on marriage—what they’re doing is they’re giving a wonderful gift to their husbands, the same sort of gift that Jesus the Son gave to his Father, right? Jesus submits to the will of the Father not ultimately because of duty. That is not the relationship. The relationship is one of love. The Holy Son is in the bosom of the Father, ever moving nearer. He loves the Father, and his love for the Father is reflected in his submission to the Father.

Now it’s hard, and sometimes duty isn’t there, right? The garden, yeah. But it’s duty that’s motivated by love. And so wives can give this great gift of the sort of submission that Jesus does to their husbands. But you see, the motivation is ultimately love. Now sometimes you just got to tough it out. And husbands give a great gift of self-sacrificial effort for their wives, and that’s what it should be. Okay?

Kind of belabored the point, I suppose, but I wanted to make sure we understood that.

Now, what I’ve got here is on your outline some pretty simple points. There’s a problem. The problem is we can forget. And in fact, we do forget. And so I’ve got some text here. Here’s what happens.

**Deuteronomy 4:9**: Take heed to yourself and diligently keep yourself lest you forget the things your eyes have seen. So I’m going to talk about how we end up being hard-hearted to God and how we end up waltzing by ourselves in our marriage—whether the other partner is there or not—waltzing by yourself in this liturgy today without really looking in the eyes of God, so to speak, the way that St. Patrick understood. Everything is motivated. I’m with Jesus. Jesus is everything that I do, and when I come and worship him I’m dancing with Jesus. Okay.

So what happens is we can forget. We’re a forgetful group. Take heed to yourself, diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, unless they depart from your heart all the days of your lives, and teach them to your children.

One way not to forget the love of God that he has shown to you in the gospel of Jesus Christ—that he came and saved you when you were the worst of sinners, right? As Paul would say, he was. I mean, we’re not saved because God sees something good in us, not because he looks down the time frame and says, “Well, that person will choose for me. Therefore, I choose him.” No. God has sovereignly chosen you in spite of yourself, okay? Not because you’re lovely, but to make you lovely. He sent his only Son to die for your sins.

The gospel is certainly about more than personal salvation, but it is about it—it is certainly never less than personal salvation either. And that’s at the core of what drives us as individuals, out of our response to God. It’s a deep appreciation for what we’ve learned. And he, they learned that they learned that God had brought them out of Egypt. He says, “Be careful you don’t forget that.” And one thing, one way he says you can avoid forgetting it is to teach it to your children. Are you teaching your children how much the Lord Jesus Christ loves you and how you love him in response? Or is it all duty? I’m, you know, law? Yeah, great. We’re a theonomic church. But the motivation for it is a response of love ultimately that drives duty. And are we catechizing our children? Are we teaching our children that’s the motivation at the heart—the love of God?

I think we are usually, but if we don’t, we end up forgetting.

Goes on to say in verse 11, Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by not keeping his commandments. So there’s no opposition between remembering God. I don’t forget because I keep his commandments. In fact, I tend to forget about God because I don’t keep his commandments. So another means of not forgetting about God is the keeping of the commandments because they’re a reminder to us. The commandments are, among other things, part of what’s called the law. What’s the first use of the law? The first use of the law is to drive us to Christ, knowing we can’t keep them. Second use is for our sanctification. The third use is our civil use. And we’re big on, you know, sanctification and civil use. But never forget that the first use of the law is a proper use and a good one. And that’s to remind us that we don’t keep any of them 100%. I have not always loved my neighbor as myself. Did you this last week? No.

So as you keep his commandments and strive to do that, what should be happening is you should be remembering the gospel—that Jesus died for you because of your sins. That your failure to love your neighbor as yourself this last week was made atonement for by the Lord Jesus Christ. So the keeping of the law has sanctification, but the sanctification is tied to realization that we can’t keep it perfectly.

So one way not to forget the gospel of Jesus Christ is by instructing your children. The other way is proper looking at the commandments and understanding them.

**Deuteronomy 8:14**: When your heart is lifted up and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage. And again, he says—now he doesn’t say be careful not to do it. He says it’s going to happen. Your heart’s going to get lifted up. I’m going to bless you, and when that blessing happens you’ll start to take it for granted and you’ll start to grow cold toward me. You’ll start to forget that you’re here because of the grace of God, right?

And so now it’s not if, but when you forget God.

**Deuteronomy 8:19**: “Then it shall be if you by any means forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you this day that you shall surely perish.”

The end result of forgetting, unless repented of, is death. Death. Now, they were going through the routines more often than not, but it’s death.

**Second Peter 1:9** says this: “For he who lacks these things is shortsighted even to blindness and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins.” So, you know, this isn’t just some Old Testament pre-indwelling of the Spirit thing. Peter says the same thing is true of us. Christians can forget, and specifically, what the great deliverance pictured by the Exodus—that was being talked about in Deuteronomy—you can forget that you are purged of your sins. You are cleansed, and you can do that. He says it is. It happens. And so, you know, whether it’s then or whether it’s this side of the cross in the Christian church, forgetfulness is part of what we go through as people, typically, or at least we’ll be tempted to do.

Peter warns Christians that it’s possible to forget their awareness of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. And the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is the great demonstration of God’s love to which we respond in love. We can forget that stuff. God says, here through Paul, so we can forget. And the end result of forgetting is that then we lose our first love.

The epistle to the church in Ephesus in **Revelation 2:1-7**, he says, “You’re doing great work. You’re doing great community groups. You got great evangelism.” We don’t yet, but let’s work on it. But you can do all that stuff. You can really have a strong and well-founded fighting of heresy in the context of the church. The Ephesians were doing that. They were doing good, good stuff. And he rewards them for all of that. He doesn’t say it doesn’t make any difference, but he does say, “But I have this against you. You stopped loving what you loved at first. You’ve forgotten your first love. The primacy of your love, your response to me and the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed to you, you’ve forgotten that.”

Okay? And so he calls them to repent of that. So we don’t want to do that. We want to become more effective. But one of the ways—what drives the effectiveness—has got to be a deep and abiding love, which is founded upon a deep comprehension and remembering of the love of God.

Let me read a little bit of context for that Second Peter 1 statement about how we can forget as well. He says this in **2 Peter 1:4**: “Whereby are given unto us exceedingly great and precious promises, that by these you might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that’s in the world through lust. And besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to your virtue knowledge, to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness. Add to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love.

For if these things—this development of Christian character that are evidences of love for God and love for our neighbor—if these things be in you and abound, they make you that you shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacks these things is blind, cannot see afar off, and has forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure. For if you do these things, you shall never fail.”

So God says, “This is what you’re supposed to do. These are the things that are growing or not. And if they’re not, you become blind and hard-hearted through forgetting the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Another so—forgetting is one of the problems that we enter into. And related to that, forgetting can be a dead formalism, right? I mean, the Old Testament prophets—Jeremiah, right? You come to church and you say, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these.” And he says, “Hey, you’re not living out of love for me. You’re not living in obedience to the law and relationship to your neighbor before you come to church. What are you doing here? You have no assurance that this formalism you’re going through, you’re waltzing with yourself.

Okay? You may be in the right place, doing the right things here, but you’re dancing by yourself. You’re really not dancing with God. Because if you were looking in the eyes of God and knowing his love for you and responding in love to the preaching of the word and the liturgy of dance and the assurances of the gospel of Jesus—when you leave here, you would love other people, okay? But you don’t. You treat them, you know, unkindly. You enslave them. You love money more. You don’t care about, you know, whether you’re being just in your economic dealings. All you care about is whether the dollar is there.

I was at the Thriftway on Sunday, or Saturday rather, paying attention. We were trying to buy Easter stuff, and you know, we still found at the Thriftway one little section of crosses—right?—little chocolate crosses. Almost nothing there that has any Christian connotation anymore, right? It’s disappearing in this country. The assurances, the reminders of a Christian worldview—and every time we go to the store, we’re reinforced in these liturgies of secularism.

And so what’s happening? The Thriftway used to be owned by a guy who was a Christian man, and then he died. And I guess when we first moved in there, my wife tells me it was actually closed on Sundays too. And you’d go in, you’d hear the checkers talking about Bible studies and stuff. Now you go there and there’s all, you know, they’re open on Sundays. There’s almost no Christian stuff left for Easter. Probably that’s the only store that has it, because so many stores don’t even have that. But it’s disappearing, right?

And so what’s happened is forgetting, and it’s been replaced by the idolatry of profit. Why would you want a productive unit of business to sit empty one day out of seven? If your god is profit, you wouldn’t. So yeah, yeah, capitalism could be good, but it can be horribly wrong as well. It can be this idolatry that Paul warned against.

Well, in any event, formalism—children growing up at RCC, this is a real danger to you, right? You’ve come here, you go through these rituals, you don’t remember, you know, much of anything necessarily unless your parents are teaching you about the gospel of Christ. You may think that you’re baptized, right? They thought they were circumcised. You go to church. They went to the temple. We’re really working hard at doing the liturgy, right? And so they were trying to do stuff right at the temple.

And you may think, “That’s great. That’s all I need. I’m set.” No, you’re not set. None of that stuff will assure your relationship with God and your entrance into the eternal state in union with Jesus apart from a heart belief and a heart relationship to the God whose gospel speaks love to you and he wants you to love him in response. And that love drives your duty and your obedience. So we have to warn our children. We have to talk about the gospel and its relationship to their salvation to avoid a form of dead formalism.

There was a man named G.I. Morice who wrote this about the spirit of God. He said that in the heart—and this is the spirit of God, the heart in relationship to God. In the heart God’s spirit dwells with might. Ephesians 3:16. In the heart God’s love is poured forth. Romans 5:5. The spirit of his Son has been sent forth into the heart. Galatians 4:6. The earnest of the spirit has been given in the heart. 2 Corinthians 1:22.

In the work of grace, therefore, the heart occupies a position almost unique. I want to talk about the heart, and the point is dead formalism doesn’t understand or doesn’t submit to, you know, a heart-centeredness and what’s going on at the internal level of our being.

Now, churches like ours that stress that a lot of change happens from the outside in rather than the inside out—and that’s a big topic which we can’t get into—but liturgy does change you. But it doesn’t do it automatically, right? We’re still saying whether you’re changed from the inside out or the outside in, we’re still saying that at some point the inside—the heart, who you are as a person. I shouldn’t say inside. Who you are at the center of your being—is Christ within me, Christ beside me, Christ is all to me. That should be your heart.

And all these things are spoken of the heart. So our emphasis on obedience, liturgy, and internal changes—which are all good and proper—can have the effect, if we don’t check it, if we’re not careful about it, of communicating to our children that this stuff about the heart really is kind of irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what we do in relationship to all the things around us. And so, you know, I think the Scriptures speak otherwise.

Now, what is the heart? You know, I was listening to a talk by Rupert Sheldrake about what’s mind, what’s the brain. He thinks the mind is this effect, this field effect that goes out from the brain. And so what’s the heart? It doesn’t mean in the Bible—Old Testament, New Testament—the beating organ. That’s not what it refers to. The heart is the seat of volition, will, and of intellect and of emotions. And it can be used in all those ways.

Let me have some verses here.

**Leviticus 19:17**: You shall not hate your brother in your heart. So emotions are related to our heart, okay? Related to our emotions.

**Psalm 4:7**: You have put gladness in my heart. So an emotional state of gladness in my heart, right?

**Psalm 13:2**: How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart? So gladness, sorrow, both found in our heart—who we are.

The intellect is described in **Proverbs 23:7** as related to the heart. For it says, “As he thinks in his heart, so is he. Eat and drink,” he says to you, “but his heart is not with you.” So as he thinks or makes intellectual decisions in his heart, this is the way he is. So both emotions—we would say—intellect are in the heart.

Jesus in **Mark 2:8**, he says to the Pharisees, “Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?” So the heart is related to our understanding and intellect also. It’s the seat of volition.

**Ecclesiastes 10:2**: A wise man’s heart is at his right hand. What motivates the hand? The will of the hand is the volitional nature that is described as the heart.

So when God tells us that Christ dwells in our hearts through the spirit by faith and that our heart should be consecrated to him and has all these important significations in the Scriptures, it means that the totality of our being—what we believe or think, what we say volitionally, what we actually do and how we feel—all of these things are to be related to the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And our heart is what responds to him. So when our heart is involved, it’s more than just what we’re doing, okay?

**Romans 10**—this is the verse we read at the beginning. And I clear outlines. You have this there, and I just put a quick little structure around it, and you probably won’t like it. You might like it. I don’t really, but it is interesting that so often this happens.

If you confess with your mouth, and then if you believe in your heart, you’ll be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made to salvation. So he goes mouth, heart, heart, mouth. There’s no doubt he does that. And so if we look at the very center, it’s being saved in relationship to your heart, and then you have confession, okay?

Now, the point of this verse is there’s two things going on that are necessary for your salvation. One is confession—speaking with your mouth, your deeds, okay? Now, there’s two ditches here. One ditch is to say it’s all about your heart relationship to Jesus and there’s no confession going on. You know, there was a recent Q Talk. I put out a link to some folks here on discipleship, and he said, you know, there’s that great St. Francis of Assisi quote: “Preach the gospel always, and when necessary use words,” and he said there’s two problems with that. One: he never said it. There’s no record of him having said that. And he belonged to a preaching order using words. And then two: it’s theologically really bad. He said it’d be like saying, “Go help the hungry, but use food only if necessary.” Go feed the hungry using food if necessary. You see, to make that kind of dichotomy is what so much of evangelicalism has done. They don’t want to confess with their mouths. They want love, but not in the name of Christ, okay?

And so there’s that ditch, right? And we want to avoid that like the plague. We want to say that, you know, that’s really not sound theologically, nor is it even practical.

Another thing—example this man used in his talk was he says you can’t strip out the heart and expect the hands to keep moving. And the heart of what’s going on here is what the second ditch is: if we ignore the heart and think that somehow all we got to do is have great community groups, do evangelism, do these external actions of speaking the truth. But Paul says no, connected to that, what actually will drive that is a heart. Is your heart? And you got to believe in your heart that Christ is Lord.

Now, if we understand that heart is not just intellect—he doesn’t mean intellectually assent to it—he means trust him with your intellect. Love him with your volition. Respond to him emotionally for his love that he’s given you—with joy and delight in him, right? So if you believe in your heart that Christ is Lord, you’ll be saved. But you got both those things going on, right? You got the what we would say is internal or personal, and then you’ve got those actions in relationship to other people.

And so the heart is an essential aspect of who we are, and it really refers to the totality of our being.

Now, when we forget and we do dead formalism, the result of that—the way the Bible talks about it—is hard-heartedness, right? We talked about this in our first sermon a little bit, and I wanted to expand on it briefly here. This whole idea of the heart in relationship to spiritual gifts.

So the problem is that we become forgetful of the gospel. Now, you know, like the heart, forgetfulness is not just an intellectual term. It doesn’t mean you can’t remember it. It means that your life isn’t built upon that truth. You’re not remembering it in the sense of your life being bound to it.

When we do this—we say this isn’t just a memory device, right? This is memorializing what Jesus has done. It does cause us to reflect on that. But if all we do is remember something—okay?—he died for me 2,000 years. We remember the death of Christ, but we don’t change who we are in relationship to that, then we haven’t really remembered it. And we’ve forgotten it even though we might know it intellectually.

So forgetting means it can mean intellectually forgetting, but it means not doing anything in response to it, not really believing the centrality of it in our existence. And when we do that, we end up with the condition of hard-heartedness.

**Ezekiel 3:7**: The house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me, because all the house of Israel have hard foreheads and a stubborn heart. So you can’t get into their thinking—their foreheads are banging against you—because their heart has been calloused over and made stubborn, and as a result they won’t listen to you.

And there’s lots of verses like this in the Old Testament warning them of what will happen. Let me read a New Testament citation of the same thing.

**Romans 2:5**: “But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart, you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

So Romans 2 says you can be hard-hearted as well, and the end result of hard-heartedness is the wrath of God. Now he’s probably talking specifically about the Jewish people who are rejecting Jesus. But let me read the verses leading up to it to bring it into our context as well.

**Romans 2:1-5**: “Therefore, you are inexcusable, oh man, whoever you are who judges. For in whatever you judge another, you condemn yourself. For you who judge practice the same things. But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things. And do you think this, oh man, you who judge those practicing such things and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart, you are treasuring up wrath for yourself.”

What’s he saying? He’s saying whenever we hypocritically judge other people for things and yet are guilty of the same or like things in ourselves, we demonstrate a hard-heartedness that’s going to bring us to wrath. And he says specifically that don’t you know that the goodness of God is what brings you to repentance?

Now, there’s no group of people that have more experience of the goodness of God than the Christian church. And if the goodness of God becomes something we lose track of in who we are and how we respond to others—the grace of God—then we become hard of heart, okay?

Now, there’s another verse in the Old Testament. Let me try to find it real quick. I kind of want to make sure you listen to this. Well, I can’t find it. That’s too bad. But in one of the prophetic books, he says, “Look, the nations around you—Babylon, etc.—they have hardness of heart. They’re unclean.” He says, “They’re unclean, but you have uncircumcised hearts.”

Actually, maybe I do have it right here. Well, I can’t find the specific verse. He says, “They are unclean, the nations round about you, because of their evil practices. And your hearts are uncircumcised.”

We look at the world around us and we know correctly that they’re not obeying God, and we, you know, are upset with them for that, and we recognize that. But he says, “When you go through a formalistic ritual and think everything is cool, not because of my great love for you and grace for you and keeping the gospel at the center of your being, and you just go about acting out your life based on duty and not a response of love to the gospel, and then you call on other people to be like that”—he says, “because of your hardness of heart, you’re just like them. There’s no distinction.”

So the people of God are living in external conformity to his word in terms of their liturgies and practices at that time. But really, they’re just like the nations round about. And Romans says that’s the sort of hypocrisy that evidences a hardness of heart.

So hard-heartedness is the result of forgetting or a dead formalism. And this hard-heartedness requires then the circumcision of our heart, right? So God says over and over again, circumcise your hearts. Says circumcise your ears. Open your ears up. But then he also says circumcise your heart. Open your heart up.

You know, to circumcise your ears is to cut off the impediment that’s getting in the way of them so you can hear the word of God. And to circumcise your heart is to recognize and let in the love of God, his word, his truth into our innermost being so that we’re no longer engaging in just some sort of you know, ritualistic response of duty to him, but that our hearts are softened. Our hearts experience the love of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and our response to him then is a softened heart.

And God says this is what you have to do. This is the sort of cycle that happens: forgetting leading to a formalism and then leading to the necessity for a circumcision of hearts, okay?

What’s the solution then? God brings us through these cycles of suffering, repentance, and renewal. Lent is kind of about this. God says, “Well, you’re going to forget me, and then I’m going to come along and judge you because of that, and bad things will happen. And when those things happen, you’re supposed to recognize anew, a fresh, my gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ.” And that will change who you are and renew you in my providence. And so this is what God says is required: repentance.

Of course, repentance.

**2 Corinthians 7:9-12**: He says, “Now I rejoice not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance.”

So when these things happen, if we recognize that our hearts are becoming callous, that our response is duty and no longer driven by our first love—our response to an understanding of the gospel of Jesus—children, you know this same thing. Hopefully, you know, there’s the quickening, right?

So a baby moves for the first time in its mother’s womb, and that’s called the quickening. And some people think that’s pretty significant. And then the baby gets born and she screams and cries. Or he, you know, big transition. And now she’s aware of life in a way that she wasn’t before. At the quickening, the baby in the womb is different somehow. She’s become aware. And I think this is a progression in the normal Christian life.

Children are raised in a Christian home, but at some point they sort of come to grips with the fact that they are, from one perspective, vipers in diapers, right? I mean, they’re consecrated. They’re cleansed through baptism, but they’re fallen people. They’re sinners saved by grace. And children in your life, at some point, you kind of recognize, “Oh gosh, I’m just a horrible person.” If you don’t recognize that, you’re in even bigger trouble because you don’t recognize the truth of the gospel—that Jesus died not for you not because he thought you were a good person that needed a little help. He died for you because you were a sinner, completely lost in your sins. That’s who you are in Adam. And Jesus regenerates you. Causes you to be born again.

And you know that’s true, but it’s just like growth, and specifically the quickening, for instance, and birth. That baby’s alive when it’s conceived, right? But things happen. And in the lives of our children, we look for these evidences that God is doing a new thing. Some they think it’s they’re becoming Christians, and they go get baptized in college or whatever it is. And we know it’s kind of a quickening or a birth experience.

The point—either way here—is that God says that is the experience of who we are in Jesus. And when we forget that first love, an understanding that Jesus died for us and for our sins when we had absolutely no call on him to do so, and he did it out of pure grace, pure love, pure mercy, right? He did it joyfully cooperating with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

When we recognize that our love for him, our great relief over our salvation—this is to be recaptured. This is to be built upon in the future. This is to be remembered and to be held at the center of our being. This is what St. Patrick’s all about. Christ is the center of who we are.

And this solution then is that God wants to remind us of these things, and he sends suffering into our lives. And in response we repent for the hardness of our heart, and he brings us to a new stage of renewal and blessing and grace through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Chris W. has an excellent sermon online on 2 Corinthians 7:9-12 on what that repentance looks like, and I will leave that for you. You can just go to the website and access it. The outline alone will help you a lot. I’m not going to read the text now, but that’s the cycle. We come to repentance for these things.

Now, listen to what Paul prays in **Ephesians 3** for the Ephesians.

“For this reason, I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

And then he launches into a doxology based upon this great prayer. The interesting thing about this prayer is he prays for things that are already true. He prays that Christ may dwell in their hearts. Well, **Colossians 1:27** says, “To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of his mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

He’s writing to the Ephesians like he does the Colossians. These are Christians, and they already have Christ in them, the hope of glory. And yet he prays that they might recognize that Christ may dwell in them with strength, right? And he tells them also in **Colossians 2:9-10**, “In Jesus dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in him who is the head of all principality and power.”

Paul is praying for the Ephesians, things that are already true of them to a certain degree. And the only way I can put those two things together is that we’re to advance in an understanding of what he prays for in Ephesians. That we are going to go through these cycles of forgetting and being called to recognize the hardness of our hearts, a repenting of that, and we’re going to then grow in our knowledge of God.

So I think this same prayer is for us: that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, that we being rooted and grounded in love—not in law, not in duty—may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

That’s what we’re called to do. I’ve asked you for six weeks to consider ramping up ministry or get involved in ministry for the first time, and we’re calling our church to become better at certain things, right? Discipling new converts, being missional into our communities, seeking justice. But you know, the reason I’m saving this for the end is the driving engine that drives this is this growing awareness of the deep love of Christ at the center of our being through the work of the Holy Spirit.

That our response to that may not just be some kind of action item to check off our list. It is that. But that our response might be a deep apprehension of the grace and the love and the mercy of Jesus Christ who died for you—in spite of your hardness of heart, in spite of all your filthiness, in spite of your rebellions, in spite of your hypocrisies. Many of you resonated to the list of ungifts that I read last week. In spite of you doing those things, God knows you. He knows you better than you know yourself. He knows all that stuff. And out of his great love for you, he sent his Lord Jesus Christ to die for your sins.

You know, there’s a book called “The Hole in the Gospel.” I think some of you have read it, and it’s about how, you know, it’s about how we have this gospel news that Jesus is salvation for us and will, you know, save us from hell. But there’s a hole in the gospel, and that is the need to understand that the gospel is broader than just that. That the good news—to use our words—is the ascension of the Savior King to the throne and that the whole world is becoming made new in Christ. The fuller gospel involves those things. So the hole in the gospel means he’s calling on the church generally to fill in social justice—formed by the Scriptures—to understand that’s part of the gospel. The good news is that Jesus came and that the world will never be the same again, and he’s going to bring justice to victory.

And this book says the hole in the gospel is a failure to recognize that. Well, there can be churches that recognize that part of the gospel, but the hole in that church’s gospel may be exactly what I’m talking about here. So we end up doing these things just out of, you know, formalism. Our response is not driven by love, but it becomes just duty. And now we’ve got a hole in the gospel that ultimately will undermine everything that we do.

Martin Luther had a quote about the gospel that I’d like to conclude with. He said this. He said that the gospel is the principal article of all Christian doctrine. Most necessary it is therefore that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads and hearts continually. That’s what we need to do. And now he’s talking about the gospel in the sense of our being saved by grace through faith—the great love of Christ shed abroad in our hearts. He knew that we’re prone to forget. He knew that we need to encourage each other. That what’s going on in our lives is the love of God shed abroad through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And our response is love in response to that love. We need to have that beat it into our hearts.

When I was at the Thrift yesterday, the checker—we started talking to him about God and the Bible. And he said that his son had told him the cross in this country is leaning. The cross used to stand upright. It’s like being weighed down by all the things that have happened in this, in the last 50 years, hundred years in our country. And the cross is leaning, almost ready to fall over.

And I thought about springtime and I thought about grass. Levi mowed our front lawn the other day, and when he did the grass—kind of there were parts of it that just kind of clumped over. Then the sun comes out, and boom, stands right back up. You know, I’m convinced that at some point, maybe sooner rather than later, the sun’s going to shine. The Spirit of God is going to come forth in a mighty way. And there are millions of blades of grass in this country—individual people. I talk to them all the time at Kaiser Permanente. Most of the nurses that treat me are some form of Christians—lapsed. They’re leaning over. You got not got a whole lot left, but there’s still a name in the name of Jesus, okay?

And I think a movement of the Spirit would cause us to pop right back up. Well, maybe the same thing’s true in your life. Maybe your zeal, your ardor, your sense of a response of love for what Jesus has done—maybe over the years, or maybe through lack of really ever comprehending it if you’re young, over the years if you’re old—maybe you’re kind of starting to lie almost flat. You think, “Man, I’m out of here. I can’t do it anymore.”

What will pop you back up—the sun that comes forth—is a deep awareness of the gospel of Jesus Christ. His love for you that caused him to die on the cross to make you worthwhile—not because you are worthwhile. When we come to grips with an understanding of that at the center of our being, when Christ dwells in our heart by faith through the work of the Holy Spirit, and we know that he shed abroad in our hearts at the center of our being his love, I think that popping back is a response—not first and foremost of obedience or duty. It’s a popping back of love that then drives us to do what the one we love wants us to do.

It’s a looking at God in the eyes as we go through this liturgy and as we go through our week. It’s recognizing that we’re being led as the bride of Jesus Christ by one who loves us so much that he laid down his life for us. That heart engine is what has to drive everything else we do and say for the rest of this year as we talk about contextualizing the gospel, evangelism, missional works, ministry works—all that stuff. The engine that drives it must be this deep felt awareness of the love of God at the center of our being. Our emotions, our will, and our intellect that then causes us to respond unto him in love—a love that will keep us going when all other motivations will fail, and a love that will be infectious to the people that we serve, calling them to love and respond.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the deep, deep love of Jesus. And we thank you, Father, that this is at the center of our being. Help us, Father, to repent if we’ve grown cold in our hearts toward you. Help us to remember our first love. Help us, Lord God, by your grace and by your Spirit to remove the calluses of our heart. Give us a fresh sense of the deep love of Jesus Christ in you, Father, for us—that you sent your only beloved Son to die for our sins. And may we love in response by the power of your Spirit, and in that love, love you and our neighbors through service. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.