Introduction: Let me ask you a question: What about your heart? Is it right with God? Notice I did not ask you about your life. If your heart is right your life will be right, but sometimes our lives may show all the external displays of faith, and yet our hearts be very far from God. In the words of Jesus, “This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” (Mark 7:6)
So what about your heart tonight? Is it right with God, or as text puts it, “Have ye your heart yet hardened?”
I want to consider three aspects of the heart tonight:
I. The Importance of the Heart
II. The Impertinence of the Heart
III. The Impenitence of the Heart
I. The Importance of the Heart.
A. It goes without saying that the heart in a physical sense is a vital organ of our bodies.
1. Without a heart we could not live, and when our hearts are in trouble our lives are in danger.
2. When the Bible speaks about the heart it is obviously not addressing that blood pumping muscle sitting behind our rib cage, but is speaking about the inner man, the real you and the real me, the soul and the spirit, if you like; the very centre of our rational and spiritual nature.
3. Therefore when someone determines to do something we say, “He has decided in his heart,” or if he gives himself totally to something we say, “He is doing it with all his heart.”
4. The heart is the centre of our thoughts and ideas.
a. The heart perceives – Deut 29:4
b. The heart understands – Prov 8:5
c. The heart deliberates – Neh 5:7
d. The heart reflects – Luke 2:19
e. The heart plans – Pro 16:9
f. The heart feels:
(i) It feels joy, pain, despair, love, hate, and every emotion in between; it is the centre of our feelings and affections.
5. That is why, in Proverbs 4:23, Solomon, under inspiration of the Holy Ghost, wrote, “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”
a. Many things in life we are to keep.
b. We keep good things from getting harm and bad things from doing harm.
(i) The success of our keeping hinges upon diligence, earnestness.
(ii) We keep our homes, gardens, cars, clothes, and finances.
c. If we would apply ourselves to keeping the heart as earnestly we would be all the better for it.
(i) Indeed the Scriptures here urge us to me even more diligent about the heart than these other matters.
• Keep thy heart with = lit “Keep above all keepings.”
• Think of the time spent upon your home vacuuming, cleaning, dusting, decorating cp how much time is given to keeping the heart.
(ii) Like many of the other things we keep the heart will not keep itself - Illus: garden
(iii) Heart by nature unclean, deceitful
• Psalm 51:10
• Jeremiah 17:9
d. We need a clean heart, for a clean heart is the key to a clean life.
(i) Everything in life, both good and bad stems from the heart.
(ii) Out of it are the issues of life.
B. The condition of the heart then is a fundamental not an incidental.
1. God wants our hearts to be right, to be pure, to be tender, to be open to His will and closed to the world.
2. How important is the heart?
3. What about your heart? Is it right with God? Have ye your heart yet hardened?
II. The Impertinence of the Heart
A. As important the heart is, it has a quality that is less than flattering, the heart, though it is central to all that we are and all that we do, has a fatal tendency to deceive.
1. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
2. Can you really trust your heart? Should we always follow our instincts and feelings.
3. Recently a friend gave me this advice, “do what you feel God wants you to do and to follow your passions.”
4. Is that good advice? I don’t think so.
5. Why?
6. Because first of all what I feel God wants me to do is of little consequence without reference to His Word, and secondly, if I follow my passions (my heart) I will certainly be deceive d into doing something I ought not to have done.
7. No God has given me a guide for the heart, He has given me His Word, but sometimes our hearts are so brazen they try to supplant the very Word of God to us.
B. Listen to some of the responses pastors receive when they counsel folks from the Scriptures.
1. “I don’t feel led to do that…”
2. “My head says you’re right, but my heart is telling me something else...”
3. “I don’t have a peace about it…”
4. “I’m going to follow my heart on this…”
5. “In my heart I….”
6. You know most times those statements are the preface to wrong actions and decisions.
7. Get this: You cannot depend upon your heart when it comes to the things of God.
8. If your heart was enough to get by on, God would never have given us the Bible.
C. Look up Matthew 15:18-19
1. Notice that every product of the heart is rooted in some form of deception.
a. Evil thoughts: Do you think that kind of thinking is clear, that it is straight thinking? No it’s perverse and mischievous.
b. Murders: Who ever heard of someone who planned a murder that didn’t also plan to cover their tracks, to hide the evidence, who didn’t think they could get away with it. Every murderer thinks he can get away with it… most don’t in this life, and none do in the life to come. But the heart flatters to deceive.
c. Adulteries. What adulterer ever thinks he is going to be found out? Of course the divorce courts are full of those who are. “It’s only a fling, only an affair, it means nothing…” How the heart deceives men into sin.
d. Fornications. Like adulterers, fornicators assume they can handle their sin. That they are in control of it, that they can master their passions. Of course, many are addicted to that practice in their lifestyle, however it manifests itself, be that in homosexuality, pornography or promiscuity.
e. Thefts. What thief ever stole something he didn’t believe he could get away with?
f. False witness. Who ever told a lie they knew and expected would be found out.
g. Blasphemies. Blasphemy is a deception concerning God, His true nature and character; it is to assume God is something He is not. “My heart tells me that a God of love would never send anyone to hell.” Do you see the implication? If God sends people to hell, he is unloving. That’s a false presentation of the nature of God, it’s a clear denial of God’s Word and it a deception to the human soul that is rooted in the heart… what I FEEL God must be like.
h. No wonder Jeremiah said, the hearts is deceitful above all things.
D. You know what God’s Word says, but your heart is telling you something else.
1. Have ye your heart yet hardened?
2. Are you going to follow the uncertain feelings of the heart against the certainty of God’s Word.
a. You know what God’s Word says about the new birth.
b. You know what it teaches about baptism.
c. You know what is says about the unequal yoke.
d. You know what it teaches on giving.
e. You know… but you don’t feel led… your heart is telling you something else, and you are going to follow your passions.
f. Oh, the impertinence of the heart?
III. The Impenitence of the Heart
A. Illus: Did you ever wonder why a Jaffa Cake is a Jaffa Cake and not a Jaffa Biscuit?
1. Apparently HM Customs and Excise wondered the same thing, especially when cakes are VAT free and biscuits incur 17.5%, so given the popularity of Jaffa Cakes the government decided to recategorise the Jaffa Cake as a biscuit and lay claim to millions of pounds of McVities’ money.
2. The matter was settled however by a VAT tribunal in a very expensive case. McVities won the case, primarily because biscuits are hard when fresh and soft when stale whereas cakes are soft when fresh and hard when stale; Jaffa Cakes, of course, fall into the latter category.
3. Well our hearts are rather like a cake, made to be soft and tender, but left to their own devices they will naturally harden.
B. In our opening text in Mark 8 the Pharisees had asked Jesus for a sign as proof of His Messiahship.
1. Of course the Lord had given many such signs and the Pharisees had rejected them, and they would certainly reject any further sign, so no sign is given.
2. Then Jesus cautions the disciples to “Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod.”
a. That is the sin of sign seeking, a sin which many have fallen into at this hour.
3. Upon hearing this word of warning the disciples assume Jesus is passing comment upon the fact they had brought no bread.
a. But the Lord had intended to warn them of what produces dullness, what produces the condition they had just witnessed in the Pharisees.
b. What makes men so incredibly blind that, when One is standing before them doing all these wonderful signs and speaking these marvellous words, they should continue to insist upon one more sign?
C. Now Jesus hearing their concerns about the bread, asks the query which is the subject of tonight’s study, “Have ye yet hardened your heart?”
1. First of all, the feedings of the five thousand and the four thousand were proof positive that the Lord didn’t really need a loaf of bread to feed them, so why were they worrying about that.
2. Secondly they missed the import of what he was really saying to them, so that he queried if their hearts were not hard.
3. In that regard he fired a series of questions at them, all of which serve to give a fuller picture of the nature of a hardened heart.
D. “Perceive ye not yet, neither understand?”
1. A hardened heart loses its spiritual perception.
2. It becomes dull of understanding.
3. It becomes impervious to all that God is doing both on a personal level and on a wider scale.
4. It takes a blinkered view of life and the world.
E. “Having eyes, see ye not, and having ears, hear ye not?”
1. Hardened hearts are too shallow to grasp the deeper things of God.
2. Jesus often spoke these words to the people He taught, and each time they mean the same thing.
a. Don’t just look at the events you are seeing and think that is all there is to it.
b. It is a parable, a parallel to something deeper and more important, concerning your spirit.
c. When Jesus was talking about the leaven of the Pharisees the disciples thought He was talking about bread, but He was talking about their practice, their doctrine, and behaviour.
d. Missing the deeper truth caused Him to belive their hearst were hardened.
F. “Do ye not remember?”
1. Hardened hearts quickly forget past blessing.
2. See 2 Peter 1:5-9.
3. Imagine forgetting that you were purged from your old sins? Forgetting who you belong to, and living like you’re the devil’s. That’s the danger in a hardened heart and that underlines the need to be ever adding virtue faith and keeping our hearts with all diligence.
Conclusion: Well what about you? Is your heart right with God? Have ye your heart yet hardened?
Do you find your spiritual perception is dulled, that you do not see God at work in your life, or in the lives of others? Do you struggle when the Word of God is read or preached to get anything out of it? Do you really think that is always the preacher’s fault, especially when others around you are blessed? Have ye your heart yet hardened?
Have you forgotten what the Lord has done for you? How He saved and sanctified you, lifting you out of the pit of sin and setting your feet upon His Rock? Are you thankful for His daily blessings? Have ye your heart yet hardened?
