We can delude ourselves and say, “well, I’m fine. I’m fine, Buddy, there’s no problem with me.” Or, we can be honest and say, “there’s a part of my life, there is a part of my heart that I have not yet given over to Jesus.”

One of the things that we tend to do as people, is that we focus on the outside. We focus on the things that we can see. We focus on what people do, how they look, how they behave, what they say; rather than what’s happening on the inside. But we know from God’s word, and we’re going to have a look at it a little bit later on today; we know that God looks at the heart and not at the outer person.

So, the subject of today, and we’re beginning a new series called, “New Heart, New Life.” It’s an exciting series; it’s a series of teaching about God’s desire to transform our lives, to change us from the inside out. So, this is the new series. It’s called, “New Heart, New Life,” and the subject for today is, “Heart Disease.”

Now, let me share with you some facts about heart disease. In the country where I live, in Australia, heart disease is the leading cause of death. Forty percent of all deaths, in my country, are from heart disease. Over 50,000 people every year, and there are 450,000 hospitalizations every year, due to heart disease. Now remember, this is in a population of just 20 million people.

Cardiovascular disease accounts for 12 percent of all recurrent health funding, about four billion dollars out of the Australian Government’s budget. And for a 40-year-old, the risk of contracting heart disease in the future is one in two, for men, and one in three for women.

The crazy thing about heart disease is that it’s mostly preventable. The key causes of heart disease are smoking, a lack of exercise, high blood pressure, and obesity.

Now, the heart is the most incredible machine. It’s about the size of our fist, so if you clench your fist and look at it and think, well, that’s about the size of my heart. It’s all muscle and it’s made up of four chambers. It has valves between the chambers. And the job of the heart is to pump blood around the body, to literally pump life into the body. If you and I live for 75 years, and have an average pulse rate of just 70 beats a minute, which is about average, our heart will beat, how many times do you think? Well, actually, our heart will beat 2.8 billion times. Isn’t that amazing?

To bring lifeblood to every cell in our bodies. Yet, we ignore the risk factors of heart disease, in breath-taking proportions. Almost half of the Australian population, and this is true right across Western Society, I’m not sure in Eastern Society, but about half of our population don’t exercise regularly. Seven million out of 20 million are overweight. Three million smoke, and three million have high blood pressure, in fact over half of the Australian population has at least one of those risk factors, and many of them have two. Isn’t that mind-blowing?

This little pump that is so vital to us, that brings life. And here are these obvious risks, these things that we ignore at our peril, and yet, somehow, in breath-taking proportions, we manage to ignore them. I believe heart disease isn’t just a problem in our society, it’s not just a physical problem: there’s also a spiritual problem; there’s a spiritual dimension. There is a, there is a spiritual-emotional heart disease that we can have, it’s a different kind of disease and yet it’s still a major concern to God.

The word heart or hearts appears 776 times throughout the Bible. God talks about an evil heart, a heart filled with pain, fearful hearts, a glad heart, a hard heart, an unyielding heart, vengeful hearts, hatred in our hearts, troubled hearts, foolish hearts, unrepentant hearts, hearts set on evil things. He talks about praying in our hearts, taking things to heart, a heart that promises to give, a heart that moves a person. A glad heart, a humble heart. Peace reigning in our hearts. Hearts set on heavenly things, making music in our hearts, refreshed and sincere hearts.

In fact, Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians. And if you have a Bible, please grab it because we’ll be going to a few places in the Old Testament and the New Testament today. To really look at what God has to say about our hearts. But Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, chapter one and verse 22. He says that the heart is where God places His Holy Spirit as a deposit, a down payment on our eternal future.

The heart, Paul also writes in Romans chapter 10 verses nine and ten, is the place where we believe. He says this, “if you confess with your mouth and believe in your hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord, then you will be saved; for it is with your heart that you believe, and are justified.”

Now, what sort of heart is God talking about? He has a lot to say about hearts, but it’s not the muscular pump in my chest that He’s talking about; He uses this term heart as a metaphor, as a picture. It’s used right through the Old Testament, in the Hebrew, and it’s used right through the New Testament, in the Greek. And when you bring all of that together, when you see God talking in His word about our hearts. Well, He’s talking about the inner person, the seat of our appetites, the seat of our emotion and passion, the seat of our courage, the absolute central, innermost part of a person.

It’s where our motives live. It’s where our desires and our dreams live. And when you think about it, it’s a good metaphor. Because it speaks about that place that pumps life into who we are. And whatever it is that’s in our heart, is ultimately what comes out on the outside of us. If it’s goodness, then goodness will come out. If it’s rottenness, if I can use that word, then it’s rottenness that’ll come out. It’s that part where we make the profoundest decisions in life. It’s that part where faith and courage combine to believe in God, over and above the most dire of our circumstances.

Or, it’s the place where we crown ourselves king or queen of our lives. It’s the place where selfishness lives. And it’s the place where we suffer the consequence. So, it’s a powerful metaphor, this metaphor of the heart. And it’s possible for us, with our physical heart to make some dire mistakes, to do some things terribly wrong in our, our diet and our exercise and our lifestyle, and smoking. We can do some terrible things wrong, and yet somehow, in our society, we ignore those obvious things en mass, and so heart disease is the biggest killer in society.

The same is true in our hearts. We can ignore some obvious things in our spiritual and emotional hearts. What are they? What are the things that we can ignore? And what our their consequences? We’re going to look at that question, when we come back after this break.

Well, what are the great mistakes that we can make with our hearts? With our physical heart, it’s what we eat, it’s what we drink, it’s the lack of exercise, it’s the nicotine and the drugs that people put into their bodies. Somehow physically, we want to gratify our senses immediately, and yet, we ignore the heart. And we ignore the heart at our peril, because we know that the greatest killer of people, is heart disease.

It’s an amazing thing to me, that we can so much focus on the here and now, on, on physical gratification. And look, I enjoy a nice, a nice dinner, I enjoy a nice glass of wine. I enjoy the good things of life. But if all we ever do is eat oils and fats and sugars and don’t exercise, then ultimately, that amazing little fist-sized bit of muscle, deep in our chests, is going to give up the ghost.

And the same is true of the heart that God talks about in His word, of our emotional, our spiritual heart. If we focus on the outside, if we do what we do, and we chase after pleasure and gratification. And even, just improving our external behavior, and ignore that deep place, somehow, things just don’t come together anymore. Try as I will to live a good Christian life, whatever that means, try as you will to live a good Christian life, somehow, it doesn’t work. Because just like with our physical hearts, we focus on the outside, and we forget about what’s going on the inside.

It’s kind of like washing your car, but never servicing the engine. Ultimately, the little sucker’s going to break down. Ultimately, it’s just not going to go anywhere. It might look good, but it’s not going anywhere. But God has a different view. See, we can have this view of Christianity which says, “I’ve got a be a good person. And so I have to change my external behavior and so I have to focus on this and focus on that, and not say this and not do that.” The Bible has a name for that; it’s called legalism. In fact, it’s called in the New Testament, the doctrine of demons, because it ignores grace.

God has a different plan. God has a plan that’s based on grace. When we see young David, who ultimately became the greatest king that Israel ever had. When we see him being chosen from amongst his brothers, by the prophet Samuel, David, well, David was the runt of the litter. And when people were looking at all the older brothers, they were thinking, “wow, he’s big and tall and good looking, maybe he’s the king; or maybe it’s the next one, maybe it’s the next one.” And God said this. He said, “look, you people, you see what’s on the outside; you look on the outer appearance of a man, but God, God looks on the inside, God looks on the heart.”

And ultimately of David, He said, “here’s a man after my own heart.” I think it’s exciting that God isn’t so concerned about what happens on the outside as much as He is about what happens on the inside. We can try and change the outside; try, but really, it’s the inside that matters, and God is focused on your heart. God is focused on my heart. If you have a Bible, I’d ask you to turn to the Old Testament, to the book of Jeremiah. It’s about 2/3rds of the way through the Old Testament. We’re going to chapter 31 of the book of Jeremiah, beginning at verse 31.

This is what God says; God is promising something new here to the people. It says, “the days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant,” or a new promise, ” with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It won’t be like the old covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. A covenant that they broke, even though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they’ll be my people. No longer will they teach one another, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they’ll all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I forgive their iniquity, and I remember their sins no more.”

This is a beautiful passage. What’s a covenant? A covenant is a promise; it’s a, it’s a legal word – if you go to the law of land titles, you will see that there is a thing called a covenant, sometimes over a title. A covenant, the legal term means, it is a promise that can’t be broken. And when God makes a promise, it’s called a covenant; and it’s absolutely unbreakable. God will not break a promise. But it’s interesting, he says, “look, everything that’s happened up until this point, in the history of Israel.” Which, to tell you the truth is an amazing history.

From the time where Israel was in bondage in Egypt, where He brought them out through the Red Sea. They wandered through the desert under His leadership for 40 years. He brought them into the Promised Land, they had the most amazing prosperity and then they turned against God. And so they were punished when the Babylonians came and destroyed Jerusalem and took Israel into slavery. And then, then God restored them and brought them back. And right at this point, God is saying to them, “I am going to make you a promise. And it’s not like the old one, because the old one that I made to you when I brought you out of Egypt, you people broke.”

And the whole thing about the old covenant, the old testament, the relationship between God and Israel in the Old Testament, was based on a covenant. And there were two sorts of covenants: a bilateral covenant and a unilateral covenant. A bilateral covenant is where two parties make promises to one another. Party A says, “I’ll do A, B, and C, if you do D, E, and F. And if you don’t do D, E, and F, I’m actually going to punish you with X, Y, and Z.” That’s basically the shape of a bilateral covenant. And that was the covenant with God and His people, Israel, in the Old Testament.

God said, “I will bring you into the Promised Land, I will bless you. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, who helped you into your Promised Land, I will bless you. It’s a land of milk and honey. All you need to do is stick with me, worship me and me alone. Don’t worship anyone else; worship me. And if you don’t do that, I’ll punish you because I love you, and I want to bring you back to me.” And that’s exactly what happened. Israel worshiped other gods, Judah worshiped other gods, these two parts of the 12 tribes of Israel. And so, God punished them.

And He says here, “this new promise I’m making with you is not going to be like the old promise.” So, what’s the difference? Well, this is what God says. “But this is the covenant that I will make in the house of Israel after those days,” the new covenant, “says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” That’s the difference.

See, the key difference between the new covenant, which is the promise we have in Jesus Christ, is a promise where God says, “it’s no longer going to be about the law outside of you. And you having to do things, and when you do well, I’ll bless you, and when you do badly, I’ll curse you. It’s no longer like that one. This is different. This is not from the outside in, this one will be written on your hearts. This one will be from the inside out. I will write my law, my love, my words on your heart.

I’ll change you on the inside. People won’t say, “get to know God anymore, because I’ll already be there. I’ll be on the inside of you. And I’ll change you from the outside in.” And this change is like the fulcrum that God’s grace swings on between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It’s a profound change because God says, I’m going to inhabit you and I’m going to change your heart.

A good example for me and my life, where ultimately something had to happen in my heart for there to be change, is this. I used to smoke between three and four packets of cigarettes a day. Now, I haven’t smoked for over 20 years. But when I did smoke, when I was a young man, I was an extremely heavy smoker. I tried to give up smoking, quite a number of times, but it just never worked for me. Until one day, I watched someone die of lung cancer, and I haven’t had a cigarette since.

It was a profound impact on my heart. And when my heart was moved, giving up smoking was actually easy. Cold turkey from three packets a day is not easy, but when God does a work in your heart, all of a sudden the change in the behavior flows so easily from that work in the heart. And the result of all that, God says here, and if you look at verse 33. He says, “I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people… they’ll know me, from the least to the greatest of them.” See, the big change here is that God wants to have a relationship.

And that’s why Paul writes that God pours His Holy Spirit into our hearts. We see this right through the New Testament. Ephesians chapter three verse 17, “Christ dwells in our hearts by faith.” Philippians chapter four verse seven, “the peace of God guards our hearts.” Colossians three verse 15, “the peace of God reigns in our hearts.” 1 Peter three verse 15, “in our hearts we set apart Christ as our Lord.”

See, there are two parts of the good news. The first part is the forgiveness that we have of our sins on the cross because of what Jesus did. If we place our faith in Him, we are forgiven, we have peace. There is no more war; there is no more stretch between God and us. We can walk in and sit down and talk with God because Jesus lets us do that, ’cause we’re clean. But the second part, the second part is the power, the enabling through the presence of the Holy Spirit, in our hearts to live a life which is godly.

And the wonderful plan of this promise is that it happens from the inside out; that we know God, that we have a relationship with God, and that changes us. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches, you can do nothing apart from me.” God means us to be grafted into Him so deeply that it fundamentally changes our lives, that our behavior changes. Now, some people will be listening to this, and they’ll say, “well, Berni, I think I’ve tried that but it doesn’t seem to work. Why doesn’t it work? Why can’t I get rid of these bad behaviors?”

That’s a really good question. Let’s come back to it after a short break.

Here we are again talking about heart disease. And so often, we struggle to change our outer behavior because we haven’t changed in our hearts. Flick with me now to Mark’s gospel, chapter 10 beginning at verse 13. Just a very short passage, it’s a beautiful passage.

“People were bringing little children to Jesus in order that He might touch them, and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this He was indignant, and He said to them, “Let the children come to me, don’t stop them; because it’s to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly, I tell you, whoever doesn’t receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands upon them, and blessed them.”

So, if we don’t accept the kingdom of God the way a little child does, we don’t enter it. Well, how does a little child receive anything from his parents, or her parents? The answer is in simple faith. With a really simple faith that doesn’t try and complicate things. And they’re able to do that because they haven’t had as much time as you and me, to cultivate sin.

Our minds are hardened. Our hearts are hardened with a wrapping of selfishness around our hearts. And what was meant to be soft and tender, becomes hard and firm and self-sufficient. “But I’ve done that, I think. I think I’ve welcomed Jesus into my heart like a little child.”

But just as the physical heart has more than one chamber, so the heart of our soul, the seat of our personality has many chambers. It has the money chamber. It has the emotional chamber. It has the self-esteem chamber. It has that I-hate-that-person chamber. It has the gossip chamber. It has the sexuality chamber. You name it, and you and I have a chamber for it in our hearts.

And the truth is, come on, the truth is, that sometimes we give Jesus access to some of the chambers, but not to all of them. We say, “Lord, you can have my go to church on Sunday chamber, you can have my emotional chamber, but I’m not letting you have access to my money chamber. I’m not letting you have access to my gossip chamber, I’m not letting you have access to this chamber or that chamber.” We close the door to that chamber for Jesus, and so, what happens is; a part of our heart, that part that we hold back from Him, that part is closed to Him.

And that part remains diseased because we won’t let Jesus in. We can let Jesus in to all of the chambers of our heart, except just one. We can keep him out of just one small part of our lives and the result of that, is heart disease. The result of that is that our behaviors can’t change because we haven’t opened that part of our lives, to Jesus.

I believe we need to be stirred, deep inside. Jesus said, “repent. Turn away from what you know is wrong. Come to me. Make me the Lord of your life.” If you and I lived in a kingdom where there’s a king who’s a totalitarian ruler, and we gave him part of our allegiance and not all of our allegiance, you know what would happen? We’d be shot for treason. A king expects our whole allegiance. God wants our whole allegiance. And sometimes we delude ourselves by giving God a part, and not the whole.

John writes about this in the book of Revelation, chapter three. He’s writing to the church in La-odice’a, and he talks about this delusion. He says,

“17 You people say, I’m rich, I’ve prospered, I need nothing; you don’t realize that you’re wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white robes to clothe you and keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, to make you see. 19 I reprove and discipline those whom I love, be earnest therefore and repent. 20 Listen, I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”

Who’s he talking to? He’s talking to a church. This is Jesus; this is a picture of Jesus standing at the door of our hearts, knocking. And we have a choice. We can delude ourselves and say, “well, I’m fine, I’m fine, buddy, there’s no problem with me.” We can do that. Or we can be honest and say, “there is a part of my life, there is a part of my heart that I have not yet given over to Jesus.”

Now, if you have heart disease, hardening of the arteries, or the blood’s not flowing, and it’s debilitating, what do you do? Let me give you a multiple choice: A. you ignore it and hope it goes away, B. you adopt a positive mental attitude, you join a gymnasium, and believe that the symptoms will disappear, C. you buy a scalpel, cut open your chest and try and fix the problem yourself, or D. you sign the consent form and you let a skilled heart surgeon operate on you and fix the problem. DUHHH!

It’s not going to go away by ignoring it. It’s not going to go away with a positive mental attitude. It’s not going to go away with a self-help program. The deep decisions of the heart are difficult to make, and almost impossible to keep. People try and change their behavior and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and suffer condemnation. What are some of those decisions? Dealing with addiction, having a regular devotional life, putting Jesus first, loving someone who’s difficult to love, buttoning our lips when we have to button our lips. They’re symptoms of a disease of the heart, and their problems are deep within.

Listen to me. Jesus is standing at the door, knocking. And if you hear his voice and open the door, and He will come in. He won’t condemn you, He will fellowship with you. He’ll have a relationship with you. And when you and I sit down with Jesus and have a relationship with Him, all of a sudden, we turn around, and, and just being with Him solves the problem in our hearts.

Come on, multiple choice: ignore it, self-help, focus on the external symptoms, or let Jesus in. We need Jesus to pour His love and His grace into our hearts, to be changed from the inside. And once, once our heart is changed, everything else follows. That’s His plan.

Without grace the church is just a bunch of scribes and Pharisees with stones in their hands. Have I forgiven those who hurt me? Have you forgiven those who hurt you?

Heart disease is one of the biggest killers in most societies these days, certainly in Australia, around the U.S., around the U.K. and increasingly throughout Asia. We know that heart disease is one of the biggest killers and yet we persist in living lifestyles that contribute substantially to heart disease.

A good friend of mine, a colleague that I worked with for many years has just had his second heart attack. And after his first heart attack he didn’t give up smoking. You look at that and think, how can the guy possibly do something like that?

Last week we began a series on heart disease. It’s called New Heart, New Life. Because the reality is that as much as we want to try and change ourselves on the outside, our looks, our behavior, the way we spend money, there’s a whole bunch of things that you and I would like to change about ourselves. The reality is that change begins in the heart. And that’s why God talks about the heart so much. When you flick through the Bible, He talks about the heart over and over again.

The heart is where we live. It’s where our personality lives. It’s where we believe. It’s where we feel, where we laugh. It’s where we cry. The heart is the very center of our personality and our desires. And the great mistake that we make, as I said before, is when we want to change we think we should change the things on the outside and that will make us feel better on the inside. But try as we might, often we just can’t change the things on the outside because changing things on the outside, changing the way we spend money, changing the way we speak to people, changing our patterns of behavior that we’ve established over years – well that stuff’s hard, isn’t it? I find it hard. And ultimately a significant change in our lives only happens when first we have a change of heart. When first God does something in our hearts and changes our desires, our wills and our passions. And then all of a sudden the behavior follows much easier.

So God’s message is a message of love and grace. God’s message is a message that says, I love you, I accept you, I paid the price for your sins, you’re forgiven; it’s a message of grace. It’s a message that says you are forgiven.

And once we wrap our hearts around that message of grace and forgiveness, so many of the things that we would like to change on the outside become much easier. The way that people see religion is about the Lord. It’s about a set of rules. It’s about complying with rules. If you do good you’ll get blessed. If you do bad you’ll get cursed. And certainly that’s the basis of the Old Testament, the old covenant. That was the relationship that God had with Israel. But when Jesus came, Jesus said, “I’ve got a new covenant, a new promise.” It’s a promise of love. I will write My love story on your hearts. Your hearts will change with a message of grace and forgiveness.

Today I really think we need to talk about what I think is the single most profound change that can happen in our hearts. It is the change of forgiveness. It is the change that happens when we receive God’s forgiveness. And then we start being able to forgive other people.

I think it’s one of the most difficult areas. It’s like having open-heart surgery for us to sit here and talk about forgiveness, because forgiveness involves hurts from the past. Forgiveness involves old wounds. It involves things so deep inside us that can move us to tears.

So before we really begin to look at this whole question of changing our hearts through forgiveness, I’d like to pray.

Father, I just ask that as we listen to Your word, as we open the book and we hear you speak to us. Father I pray that You would just open our hearts. I pray that You would gently, gently minister into our lives by whispering Your words of love and grace and forgiveness. Lord, where it hurts, where it’s painful to think about forgiveness, Father we just pray that You would be there. You would be in that place in our hearts to love us and to touch us and to guide us and to heal us with your love. Father, we pray that in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Let’s begin this whole issue of forgiveness by looking at a woman who was caught in adultery. And this woman was brought to Jesus, she was dragged in front of Jesus. The tradition in those days was that anyone who was caught in adultery would be stoned to death.

If you have a Bible go grab it. We’re going to John’s gospel; it’s just in the New Testament, fourth book in the New Testament, John’s gospel, chapter 8. This woman is caught in adultery.

When we read this, what we will see is two groups of people, the guilty and the righteous. The guilty being the woman who’s been caught in the cot with another man and the righteous being all the other people who are enraged and indignant about what she has done.

There are actually two different groups of the guilty people. Jesus does some wonderful things here and redefines our legalistic stereotypes. There are two groups of guilty people, those who acknowledge their wrongs and those who don’t. Let’s just have a look to see what happens here.

John, chapter 8, verses one and two. “Then each of them went home while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning He came again to the temple. All the people came to Him and He sat down and He began to teach them.”

So here we are, Jesus, the son of God is in the temple court. So there they are in the middle of this, what we would call a church service. Then the scribes and the Pharisees who were religious leaders brought a woman who had been caught in adultery. Caught in bed with another man, caught in the very act and making her stand before all of them. They said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.” That would have been uncomfortable.

Now in the Law of Moses, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What do you say? So the Pharisees interrupt the church service. They drag this woman in and the custom was to strip her down to the waist. So here is this terrified, defenseless woman, publicly humiliated, carried before Jesus, the Son of God, in the midst of the congregation, stripped down to her waist. Her arms probably covering her bare breasts; absolutely mortified that she will be stoned to death. Get the picture? And there are two groups of people in this picture, the righteous, the ones who didn’t commit adultery and the guilty one, this woman.

In a minute we’re going to come back and look at exactly what Jesus does because He does a powerful thing in challenging a traditional understanding of rights and wrongs and people who are guilty and people who aren’t guilty. We’ll come back to that straight after this break.

Just before the break we were looking at Jesus and how He dealt with this woman who had been caught in the very act of adultery. Imagine this. She’s caught in bed with another man. She’s dragged out, stripped down to her waist. They want to stone her to death. She’s dragged into a church service in front of the Son of God and the people, the leaders, the religious leaders, the Pharisees and the scribes say, “Come on Jesus, what are you going to do?” This woman has been caught in adultery.

Now, of course it takes two to tango. Not only the woman, there was obviously a man involved as well. Where’s he? Well, they just dragged the woman in and they’re not so much interested in her, they want to catch Jesus out.

You see this is a trap and He knows that He is playing for His life. Have a look at it again. Let’s pick it up at verse 4. They said, “Teacher, this one was caught in the very act of committing adultery.”

Now in the Law of Moses, Moses commanded us to stone such a woman. “What do you say?” They said this to test Him so they might have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. Here’s the catch for Jesus. The religious law, the law of Moses, the law that governed the social and religious life of the Jews specified in Leviticus, chapter 20, verse 10, Deuteronomy 22:22, it specified that someone caught in adultery should be stoned to death. However, the Roman law, remember is around in the first century was an occupied land. It was occupied by the Roman Empire. They were brutal in administering justice. But the Roman law forbade stoning.

Jesus got a catch 22. Who will Jesus obey? If he obeys Moses, he goes against Roman law and the religious leaders can bring a charge against Him for breaking Roman law. If on the other hand he says, “Look, we’re not going to stone her because the Roman law says we’re not allowed to.” He’s breaking religious law. And again, they have a charge to bring against Him. Either way, they win and Jesus loses.

All the eyes are fixed on Jesus. He knows He’s playing for His life. And He’s playing not only for His life, but also for the life of this woman caught in adultery. It’s a moment of crackling tension. And Jesus does something unique. He squats down and He writes in the sand. What does He write? We don’t know. Some people have postulated, well, maybe Jesus was writing the names of all the other guilty people that were there. We don’t know that.

It’s a moment of danger. It’s a moment when Jesus is silent and he squats down, and I believe He’s waiting for the Holy Spirit to give Him the words, to give Him the wisdom, to give Him the answer. So He stops and thinks.

Remember, there were two categories of people here; in a sense, us and the Pharisees; the righteous ones. We haven’t committed adultery; and the guilty woman, the adulteress, caught in the middle of the act of adultery, cheating on her husband.

When Jesus finally speaks He demolishes those two categories. They said it to test Him so they might have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bends down and writes with His finger in the ground.

When they kept questioning Him, He straightened up and He said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again, He bent down and wrote on the ground. Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first one to throw a stone. It’s a brilliant strike. Because He says, look the two categories that you have in your mind, guilty and not guilty, guilty and righteous; they’re not the categories at all.

There are two categories here. There are sinners who have been caught or who have admitted what they done and there are sinners who deny what they’ve done. This woman’s out in the open, they know what she’s done wrong. But Jesus is looking at their hearts. At the hearts of those very men who would stone this woman to death and say, “Come on guys, you’ve done stuff wrong too, haven’t you?”

So any of you who’s never broken the Law of Moses, any of you who’s perfect, you be the first one to cast a stone. And one by one they drift away. Why could no one cast a stone? Because they knew in their hearts that they were guilty too.

And then they went away, one by one beginning with the elders, beginning with the leaders and Jesus was left along with the woman standing before Him. And Jesus stands up and says to her, “Where are they? Is there no one here to condemn you?” And she said, “No one Sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way and from now on don’t sin again.”

But why didn’t Jesus condemn her? He had every right. The only person in that group of people who had never sinned against the Law of Moses, who had never done anything wrong was Jesus himself.

Jesus could have cast the first stone. He was the one person there that could have done it, but He didn’t because Jesus is the Son of God, the God of grace, and the God of forgiveness. And the price of that forgiveness is His flesh, is His death on the cross. And here in His actions, in a very real sense He shows what He is about to do on the cross. Because Jesus himself was playing for His life. And He put himself between this woman and the angry mob that wanted to stone her to death. Jesus put himself between the two.

What impact did that have on the woman? Imagine what it must have meant to her. If you and I were that adulteress and we are. What would we feel at that moment? It would have been absolutely impossible not to receive God’s forgiveness, wouldn’t it? It would have been absolutely impossible not to experience how much God loves us through Jesus. Because Jesus puts himself between the guilty woman and the angry mob which stands. Jesus, the Son of God stands between you and a stoning to death.

Probably when she saw Him sometime later on the cross, in her heart she would have know the price of His forgiveness as He died for her, as He died for you, as He died for me.

Trembling, humbled, without excuse, stripped bare to the waist, completed humiliated in fear of her life, she received God’s grace. She received God’s protection when she didn’t deserve it. Fully aware that she done the wrong thing.

Why do we fight it so hard to receive God’s forgiveness? The answer is because we just don’t feel worthy. We just don’t feel that we deserve God’s forgiveness. But here’s the rub, mercy is only mercy when it’s not deserved. Grace is only grace when it’s not deserved. Forgiveness is only forgiveness when it’s not deserved.

When you and I look at what Jesus did on the cross; Jesus placed Himself between us and an angry God. You might say, “Hang on Bernie. Does God get angry?” Yes He does. The Bible says clearly that He does. God is a god of justice. God is a god of making sure that the right thing is done. And when you and I sin, when you and I fail, when you and I do the wrong thing. What we deserve is the wrath of God. What we deserve is the punishment of God but instead Jesus puts himself between us and God and says, “Father, punish Me. Allow Me to be nailed to a cross. Allow Me to suffer. Allow Me to die. Because I love them.

That message if for you, that message is for me. And when you and I look at the cross and gaze upon that wondrous sight, what we know is this. We are forgiven. You are forgiven if you place your faith in Jesus. I am forgiven if I place my faith in Jesus.

In a moment we’re going to come back and have a look at probably the most disturbing part of this story. The disturbing part of this story is who you and I actually identify with.

Well, here we are in Christianity Works and we’ve just been looking at this story of God’s grace through Jesus. As this woman is brought to Him to be stoned because she was caught in adultery. And Jesus redefines the categories of people that are in that place because the human view is that here’s this one woman who is guilty of doing something wrong because she’s been caught. And all the rest of us, well we’re not guilty of that. She’s done a horrible thing.

I can kind of relate to that view. I have a few friends and acquaintances recently; some men who have left their wives for other women. And some women who have left their husbands for other men. And when I look at that it just tears my heart out. I think, “How can you do that to your husband? How can you do that to your wife?” And my tendency and probably your tendency too is to look at those situations and say, “That is really awful! That is terrible! I cannot believe that they have done that to the person whom they promised to love for the rest of their lives.”

So we end up identifying more with the accusers then we do with the guilty woman. Let’s face it, really, if ever are we caught in public in indiscretion? Come on, we cover things up, we cloak our sin in trappings, in respectability. Sin is sin. Doing the wrong thing is doing the wrong thing. And the human thing that we try to do is to hide it. In fact, a good rule is that if we feel that we have to hide something from people, probably that thing is wrong.

And we look at other people who do things wrong. We look at those men who left their wives for the younger woman and we want to throw stones at them. Come on. How many of you men listening today haven’t looked at a woman in the wrong way? How many of you women listening today haven’t thought of stories and romances in the wrong way about other men?

Don’t get me wrong. Sin is sin. When you and I do something wrong it is sin. When other people can see it or not. But we shouldn’t be Pharisees with stones in our hands. We shouldn’t be people condemning other people for what they have done wrong when, come on, you and I have done things wrong too.

Sin is always sin. I heard a wonderful quote recently, “It’s easier for homosexual men to get sex out there on the street then a hug in church.” What does that say about grace? Whatever you and I think about what constitutes right and wrong; and I have some very strong views. Whatever you and I think about what constitutes right and wrong in this particular situation; look at this woman caught in adultery. And Jesus stands up for her, Jesus loves her, Jesus pours grace into her heart. And that’s where change begins, with God’s love and grace and forgiveness.

Without grace the church is just a bunch of scribes and Pharisees with stones in their hands. That’s the public dimension. But what about the private dimension; people, individuals, faces of people who hurt us. And we harden our hearts against them. We whisper about them, we shun them, we reject them, and we accuse them.

Jesus says murder begins where? Murder begins in the heart. Have I forgiven those who have hurt me? Have you forgiven those who’ve hurt you? Or are we one of those Pharisees? Are we one of those scribes? Are we one of those religious zealots with stones in our hands that we want to throw at people?

You think that adulteress, that woman caught in the sack with a man, do you think after she experienced the grace of Jesus that she has the capacity to forgive? Of course she does. But why? Because she received forgiveness first. And that’s the struggle for us, isn’t it? Part of us because we’re made in God’s image and God is a just God. God wants justice to be done. Part of us wants to say eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It’s got impeccable logic about it, it’s just but Jesus says, “Well that’s all well and good, but I’m the one that got punished for you. I’m the one that gets punished, ” Jesus, the Son of God in the very image of God expresses love in the face of sin. He expresses grace and forgiveness in the face of failure.

Here’s a question. Is God’s forgiveness conditional or unconditional? Let’s have a look at the 8th chapter of Matthew, Matthew 8:21.

It says this, “Then Peter came and said to Him, Lord if another member of the church sins against me how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” And Jesus said to him, “No, not seven times. I tell you seventy-seven times.”

And then Jesus went on to tell a story, he said, “For this reason the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning one who owed him 10,000 talents, which is a lot of money was brought to him. And as he couldn’t pay his Lord ordered him to be sold together with his wife and his children, all his possessions in payment to be made.

So the slave fell on his knees before the king saying, have patience with me and I will pay you everything. And out of pity for him the Lord of the slave released him and forgave him. But that same slave, as he went out came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him 100 denary, which is much less money, and seizing by the throat says, pay what you owe.

Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, have patience with me and I will pay you. But the slave refused. And then he went and threw this other slave into prison until he could pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened they were greatly distressed and they went and reported to their Lord all that had taken place. Then his Lord had summoned him and said you wicked slave. I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you have not had mercy on your fellow slave as I had mercy on you? And in anger his Lord hands him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt.”

Question: Is God’s forgiveness conditional? Have a look at another story that Jesus talked about. Matthew, chapter 6, beginning at verse 9.

Jesus said, “Praying this way, our father in heaven hallowed be thy name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into a time of trouble but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Now, let me ask you that question again. Is God’s forgiveness conditional or unconditional? Jesus is pretty blunt about the fact that we need to forgive other people. But why does He insist on this? Why is Jesus so insistent that we should forgive other people even before religious duties?

Look at Matthew, chapter 5, verse 23. “So when you’re offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled with your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift to God.”

Why is Jesus so insistent that we should also forgive? I think that the answer is this, because forgiveness is unnatural. It’s painful, it’s not right, but it’s the only way that we can stop the cycle of reputation of sin. It’s the only way that we can stop wars. It’s the only way we can stop arguments, it’s the only way to let go of the past.

Forgiveness has a power that reaches beyond justice and the law. The majority of the parables explain that. The parable of the 11th hour, the parable of the widow with the lost coin, the parable of the Shepard with the lost sheep.

None of it’s logical. But forgiveness breaks the cycle of anger and justice and retribution. Imagine a world where people just forgave each other. Imagine a world where we just looked at someone who failed us or hurt us and we said, “I forgive you.”

Maybe we don’t even say it with our lips. Maybe we just whisper it in our hearts; I forgive you, I love you anyway, I will encourage you, I will hold you close. I will honor you, I will respect you, I will bless you. No matter what you do I will forgive you.

Imagine marriages, imagine families, imagine work places, imagine, and for me the only thing that lets me even contemplate being able to love people in such an unconditional way, the only thing is that I tasted the forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ.

And anyone who had stood at the foot of the cross and looked at the suffering Jesus, the Jesus who suffered for you and for me can taste that forgiveness. And when we taste that forgiveness it changes our hearts. And when it changes our hearts then and only then can we be a people of grace, a people of love, a people of forgiveness, a people that shine out the love of Christ in a dark world.

God has a plan for your life. It’s a good plan, it’s a plan to build you up and not to tear you down. Even when God calls you to stand in place and just be there because God said, ‘Be there for me!’

I was wandering around the sales in the shops the other day and I just couldn’t get over the number of choices just looking for a couple of shirts and there were so many shirts to choose from. But the clear impact of economic development is that we have more and more choices: Will I buy this shirt or will I buy that shirt? There is an endless array of food and coffee and travel and belief systems and sexuality options and marriage and family models and to have kids or don’t have kids. The underlying basis for all of this is choices and the subliminal message with all of that comes in two parts: Firstly, make choices that are in your best interest and secondly, if you buy this or do buy that, you’ll be happy.

I’d like to share a story with you of some people I know, a husband and a wife, and one of them was unfaithful in the marriage. The other one was a Christian and this person believed in God and walked with Jesus and decided to stand by the one that had been unfaithful in the marriage. A couple of kids – difficult situation. One was unfaithful and the other one just stood by that marriage partner. Did the one who stood by the unfaithful one make the right choice? It would have been difficult. It would have been a scary, fearful time.

If you have a Bible I’d like you to open it and turn with me to Hebrews 4:12-13. We’re in the middle of series called New Heart, New Life and it seems to me that often the problems that we have in our lives have a lot to do with the problems that are going on in our hearts. This is what the writer of Hebrews says: “Indeed the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides the soul from the spirit, the joints from the marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before Him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the One to whom we must render an account.” What a wonderful, wonderful scripture. The Word of God, God Himself, strips bare the human heart. Nothing is hidden. All of our motivations, all that is going on, all that’s right all that’s wrong, all of the choices that we make in our hearts are open to God. And God’s Word tells us about God, how He works, what His Father at heart is, what His desires are for His people and how much He loves us that He looks into our hearts.

I believe a part of what God wants to do for us is to equip us to make the right choices. And so often our hearts are divided. So often the choices that we make in our hearts, the hurts that we feel in our hearts, the fears that we feel in our hearts dictate the choices that we make. I know a lot of people who say, “I’m a Christian. I’m a spirit-filled Christian.” And yet, I see people make bad choices in their lives, just drift through their life and then they turn around and they’re jealous of the blessings that appear to be happening in other people’s lives.

One of the things that can really cloud our judgement, cloud the decisions of our heart is fear. When I was in the army, I spent ten years as an officer in the Australian army, we used to talk about the ‘fog’ of war. You know, when you’re fighting a war and people are shooting real bullets at you and real shells at you and real bombs are going off and you’re tired and you’re hungry and you’re afraid, decision-making turns out to be quite difficult because you’re under stress and you’re in fear and that concept is the ‘fog’ of war that armies talk about.

I believe a lot of people who say, ‘I believe in Jesus’ live in that ‘fog’ of war and it’s hard to make decisions in the middle of fear, in that ‘fog.’ And so a lot of people drift through life. I think the difference between a drifter and a disciple is a choice. It is a choice to bare our hearts before God and lay all of our decisions, all of our fears, all of our desires, everything in our hearts down before God.

Jesus made that really clear. Sometimes we accidentally get in the way of one of God’s blessings and that’s wonderful. But God honors decisions in our hearts that honor Him. The Bible says God honors those who honor Him. And I don’t know about you but I’d like to be in a place that God has planned for me, a place where God can bless me.

So today we’re going to look at some decisions that some people made a few thousand years ago, in fact, 586-587 B.C., so two and a half thousand years ago. It’s some decisions that some of the Isrealites made in relation to baring their hearts to God, making decisions in fear, and getting it right or getting it wrong. I think we can learn a lot from this story.

Again if you have a Bible, flip way back into the book of Jeremiah which is kind of two-thirds, three-quarters way through the Old Testament. The book of Jeremiah we’re starting at chapter 41. If you haven’t got one, not a problem, I will be reading the scriptures that we’re going to, the text that we’re going to, but this is a powerful story of a remnant of Israel that is left behind when Israel is plundered by the Babylonians.

Let’s just quickly run through the history that gets Israel to this point in time. Abraham, if you go back to Genesis chapter 12, Abraham was a man who listened to God and God called him out of a place called Ur where is the Chaldeans subsequently lived, or Chaldea or Babylon are sometimes the names used for this place that Abraham came from. And he came out and he wandered around and God promised him a son and ultimately when he was a hundred years old God gave him a son called Isaac and Isaac had a son called Jacob and Jacob had twelve sons. Jacob was actually renamed Israel, that’s where the name Israel comes from. It means literally “to struggle with God” because Jacob one night struggled with one of God’s angels.

Jacob, or Israel as he was subsequently known, had twelve sons – one of those was Joseph who became the prime minister of Egypt. He’s the one that Joseph in the technicolor dream coat, that musical, is all about. And these twelve sons became the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel and ultimately they were enslaved in Egypt, they became so populous and they were groaning under the slavery of the pain and the oppression, God heard them and God sent Moses to tell Pharoah, ‘Let my people go.’

Well, if you know this story, Pharoah wouldn’t let God’s people go and so God sent ten plagues on Israel – awful plagues – turned the Nile River into blood and sent locusts and sent diseases and ultimately the last plague was that God killed the first-born in every Egyptian household, but He didn’t do it for the Israelites. And so Pharoah let them go, they went down to the Red Sea and all of a sudden Pharoah’s army began to pursue the Israelites; God parted the Red Sea, they went through it, the Red Sea came back in again on the Egyptian army, destroyed the army and for the next forty years God led Israel through a desert that would have taken them only eleven days to travel through. But, the Israelites grumbled so much, they dishonored God so much, they were in the desert for forty years.

Well after those forty years Moses died and through the leader, Joshua, God took them into the promised land, the land of milk and honey. They had a period where they’re ruled by judges and ultimately they decided they wanted a king. Their first king was Saul. Saul was a disaster of a king. The next king was David. David was one of the greatest, probably the greatest king that Israel ever had. He had a son called Solomon – the wisdom of Solomon is quite prophetic. Solomon was wealthy, he was a great king, he built the temple in great splendor.

But after Solomon died he had two sons, Jereboam and Rehoboam and they couldn’t get on. Jereboam went to the north and he didn’t follow God and so the ten tribes of the north separated from the two tribes of the south. The two tribes of the south that remained were Judah and Benjamin and ultimately they were referred to as just Judah. And the ten tribes of the north were ultimately wiped out, but they were referred to as Israel. So you had this apostasy that God’s king and God’s people turned away from Him for years and ultimately God’s judgement fell.

God had said to His people, ‘You follow Me, you love Me, you do what I’ve commanded you to do and I will bless you. But if you don’t, I will punish you.’ And sure enough in 586 B.C. King Nebuchadnezzar from Babylon came and rolled in over the top of Judah and completely destroyed Israel, completely destroyed Jerusalem, completely destroyed the temple and took most of Judah and Benjamin into captivity in Babylon.

Now Nebuchadnezzar was the Hitler of the time. He was evil personified. He gouged the king’s eyes out Zedekiah, deported all the able-bodied people and slaves and he killed the king’s sons before his very eyes. This was God’s judgement.

BUT, he left some people behind. These people were the poor people. If you flip back in Jeremiah 39:10 you see that Nebuzar-adan, the captain of the guard, left in the land of Judah some of the poor people who owned nothing and he gave them the vineyards of the fields at the same time. So these people were left behind and they received a message from God, ‘Stay there, feel safe’ and the Babylonians or the Chaldeans, if you like, appointed a governor – Gedaliah – Gedaliah who is appointed as the governor of this remnant of these poor people who kind of took possession of the land once all the able-bodied people had been taken out into slavery.

But then something terrible happened. Ishmael, and Ammonite from a different tribe from a different nation in fact, Ishmael decided he didn’t like this so he killed Gedaliah and pick it up in Chapter 41 beginning at verse 1.

“In the seventh month Ishmael of the royal family, one of the chief officers of the king, came with ten men to Gedaliah at Mizpah. As they ate bread together there at Mizpah, Ishmael son of Nethaniah and the ten men with him got up and struck down Gedaliah with a sword and killed him because the king of Babylon had appointed him governor of the land. Ishmael also killed the Judeans who were with Gealiah at Mizpah and the Chaldeans soldiers who happened to be there as well.”

So here’s this picture. Ishmael comes and has dinner with the governor, he sits down, there are some Chaldean soldiers there who belong to the king of Babylon and Ishmael kills them all. You can imagine this remnant of poor people left in the land are petrified of what the king of Babylon is going to do to them now. Not only had Ishmael murdered the governor that the king of Babylon had appointed, Nebuchadnezzar appointed this governor, he also killed the Babylonian soldiers and the Judeans that were with him. So there was enormous fear of this little remnant of poor people in the land of Judah around Jerusalem that the king of Babylon would kill them. They were terribly afraid.

Question: Is it a sin to be afraid? I don’t believe so. Fear is a natural consequence of personal threat. Fear impacts our lives too. There are situations, there are people at home, maybe you have a dominating husband or a nagging and unloving wife or maybe there’s tension between the kids and the parents and it causes fear. Maybe you’re afraid of the exam that’s just around the corner or the challenge at work. Maybe there’s people in our workplace that threaten us or even in our church. And sometimes we have brooding choices in our lives that we have to make right now.

Maybe you have a choice that you need to make in your life right now and yet there is fear in your heart. Fear is a powerful motivating force. Fear makes us want to run away sometimes. I don’t believe that’s a sin, I think that’s a natural reaction to a circumstance. I feel fear sometimes. I’m sure that you feel fear sometimes. But fear divides our hearts and here we have a nation that is afraid, they’re intending to run away.

Listen to what it says if you go to the bottom of chapter 41 beginning at verse 17, this is what it says: “They set out and they stopped near Bethlehem intending to go to Egypt because of the Chaldeans because they were afraid of them because Ishmael had killed Gedaliah whom the king of Babylon had made governor over the whole land.”

Were they afraid? Absolutely! Have they sinned yet? Well, let’s have a look and find out. They are afraid and they’re intending to run away and in a sense we are all driven by making choices that we believe to be in our own interest. We need to be aware that our culture says that saving your own bacon is the right thing to do. But God’s Word also says that we don’t fight flesh and blood, we fight principalities and powers. When you are afraid, when I am afraid, the devil is getting ready to have a field day in our lives.

In a moment after a short break we’re going to come back and see exactly how this story of fear plays out in the lives of this remnant left in Judah in Jerusalem.

We’ve been looking at this story of this remnant of poor people left in Judah, Jerusalem after the Babylonians came and ransacked the place and killed the king’s sons, gouged the king’s eyes out, took all the able-bodied people across to be slaves in Babylon. But he left a remnant of people there. He left some poor people there. He put a governor over the top of them, Gedaliah, and Ishmael comes along and murders the governor so understandably all the people who are left are afraid. They’re afraid because, well, what’s the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, going to do?

Well, let’s see what happens next. We saw before that they stopped near Bethlehem on their way to Egypt. Let’s pick it up at chapter 42 beginning at verse 1 in Jeremiah. “Then all the commanders of the forces and Johanan, son of Kareah, and all the people from the least to the greatest approached the prophet Jeremiah and said, ‘Be good enough to listen to our plea and pray to the Lord your God for us for all this remnant. For there are only a few of us left out of many as your eyes can see. Let the Lord your God show us where we should go and what we should do.’ The prophet Jeremiah said to them, ‘Very well. I’m going to pray to the Lord your God as you requested and whatever the Lord answers I will tell you. I will keep nothing back from you.’ They in turn said to Jeremiah, ‘May the Lord be a true and faithful witness against us if we do not act according to everything the Lord your God sends us through you. Whether it is good or bad, we will obey the voice of the Lord our God to whom we are sending you in order it may go well with us when we obey the voice of the Lord our God.’ At the end of ten days the Word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. Then he summoned the people.”

Now, isn’t that interesting. They stop, they say ‘let’s do the right thing here.’ We see all the disaster that’s fallen on the land, we now see this disaster of the governor being murdered, we have fear in our hearts but we’ve got to do the right thing. We’re going to stop and talk to the prophet Jeremiah who clearly gets messages from God. And we’re going to say, ‘Listen, we need a hand here. We don’t know what to do. Should we run away? Should we stay? What’s going to happen?’ So, they appear to do the right thing.
But look clearly at verse two what they say. “Be good enough and listen to our plea and pray to the Lord your God.” These are Jews. It’s their God too and yet they say to Jeremiah, “Pray to your God.” That tells me something. That tells me that they’ve already distanced God in their hearts. Come on, look at what’s going on. They’re on the way to Egypt. It appears to be the only safe place that they can flee to so they won’t suffer the retribution of king Nebuchadnezzar for this murder of the governor.

Then they say to the prophet, your God. We’ll obey – they emphatically say ‘we’ll obey.’ Do you sense that they’ve already made their minds up? It’s almost like they’re on their way to Egypt, we know the right thing to do, let’s just check with God and get God’s little nudge and we’ll go and do what we decided to do.

Don’t we do that sometimes? Don’t we suffer from fear? Fear that’s not our fault. I mean, it’s not their fault that Ishmael came and murdered the governor, clearly not their fault. But then fear gripped their hearts, fear grips our hearts. And we make decisions out of fear and then we go and pray to God to get him to confirm our decision. Come on, don’t we do that?

And sometimes, have you ever had this experience, you’ve made your mind up, you know you’re going to do it this way and you go and pray and you sense God saying to you, “That’s not the way I want you to go.” It’s hard when we’ve made our minds up to listen to God if God has a different view. It’s even harder when we’ve made that decision in fear and the decision is designed to protect us, to save our bacon, because after all that’s an entirely acceptable thing for us to do in our society.

And so, here they are under fear, it’s this natural sense of self-preservation that’s blinded them potentially to God’s will. Our will is a spiritual battle ground and we can either go God’s way and anything other than God’s way is sin. It’s missing the mark, it’s missing the whole point of life.

Let me ask you a question, have they sinned yet? Well, on the surface they haven’t but what’s going on in their hearts?

Now we see there at the beginning of verse 7, “At the end of ten days the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. Then he summoned Jonathan and all of the commanders of the forces who were with him and all of the people from the least to the greatest and said to them, ‘This is what the Lord the God of Israel to whom you sent me to present your plea has said.” Ten days. TEN days! Let’s just get a perspective here. The governor has just been murdered! The Babylonian king’s own guards have just been murdered! And further on in the story, we haven’t gone through that, another eighteen men have just been murdered! Retribution is about to fall. When the king of Babylon hears about this, when his commanders hear about this, they’re going to come and wipe us out, aren’t they? And the prophet takes TEN DAYS! What’s going on, God??

I’m afraid of reprisal, this is urgent and God makes them wait ten days! Must have seemed like an eternity. You and I know ten days isn’t very long at all. But it’s a long time when you’re scared, right? Ten days is a long time to be in fear for your life. Why did God do that? Well, maybe Jeremiah felt he just needed to get it right. Maybe he felt a natural tendency to say stay or go and he just wanted to make sure it was God’s word and not his word. And maybe God made Jeremiah wait for ten days to sort out the people’s hearts.

You know something? We need time sometimes to sort out what’s going on in our hearts. In ten days our hearts can become tender toward the Lord and we can have a desire for obedience. Or in ten days our hearts can harden and we can have a desire for sin.

This is a situation of extreme pressure and great fear. What will God say? Will He encourage them to go, will He encourage them to stay, what’s going to happen? We’ll look at that in a moment when we come back from this short break.

Well, we’re looking today at the story of this little remnant of poor people who were left in Judah after Babylon invaded. Babylon is now the occupying force, most of the wealthy and healthy people have been taken as slaves back to Babylon by king Nebuchadnezzar’s army. And what’s left here is this little remnant of poor people, king Nebuchadnezzar appoints a governor, Gedaliah, and Gedaliah gets murdered and now this remnant is afraid. They’re so afraid they want to run away to Egypt and they stop by near Bethlehem just to sort of talk to the prophet Jeremiah and the prophet Jeremiah goes and asks God, ‘God, what do you want the people to do?’ And before Jeremiah comes back the people say, ‘We’re going to do whatever God says.’

Pretty easy thing to say isn’t it? ‘We’re going to do whatever God says!’ Unless God comes back with an answer that doesn’t feel right. Unless God comes back with an answer that doesn’t fit with our view of what we need to save our bacon, right? All of a sudden when God comes back with something challenging and scary, boy that’s hard to say, ‘Yes Lord I’ll do what you want me to do!’

And so ten days Jeremiah goes and talks to God and he comes back and he says, ‘This is what God has to say for you.’ I’m looking now at Jeremiah chapter 42:10. “If you will only remain in this land then I will build you up and not pull you down. I will plant you and not pluck you up for I am sorry for the disaster that I’ve brought upon you. Don’t be afraid of the king of Babylon as you have been. Don’t be afraid of him says the Lord for I am with you to save you and to rescue you from his hand. I will grant you mercy and he will have mercy on you and restore you to your native soil. But, if you continue to say, ‘We will not stay in this land’ thus disobeying the voice of the Lord your God and saying, ‘No, we’ll go back to the land of Egypt where we shall not see war or hear the sound of the trumpet or be hungry for bread and we’ll stay there,’ then hear the word of the Lord thou remnant of Judah: Thus says the Lord of hosts the God of Israel, if you are determined to enter Egypt and go to settle there, then the sword that you fear shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt. And the famine that you dread shall follow close after you into Egypt and there you will die. All of the people who have determined to go to Egypt to settle there shall die by the sword by famine and by pestilence, they shall have no remnant or survivor from the disaster that I am about to bring on them.”

Well, that’s a really easy thing for God to say, you know, stay here, don’t worry about Nebuchadnezzar. But the end of the story looks like this: they ran away. They disobeyed God because they wanted to save their own bacon. As you read on in the subsequent chapters, 43 and onwards, what you discover is exactly what the prophet said happened. They thought that if they stayed where God had called them to be, they’d be safe, but they died from the sword and they died from famine and they died from pestilence and there was none of them left, none of the remnant because they failed to obey God.

Let me say this to you. God has a plan for your life, it’s a good plan. It’s a plan to build you up and not to tear you down. Even when you’re afraid, even when God calls you to stand in a place and just be there because God said be there for Me. God has a plan for your life. Maybe your marriage is tough right now. Maybe your job is tough right now, maybe your family is tough right now, maybe you have a fearful heart. A fearful heart can become a divided heart. Give it just ten days – it’ll become a hardened heart. And when it becomes a heart that is hardened to God, it becomes a fallen heart.

We aren’t meant to be drifters, we’re called to be disciples, we’re called to stand. I believe God is calling you and me to a decision today. Are you prepared to say, ‘I am determined to put God above all in my life, even though it may mean that I must stand completely deserted in the midst of this earth?’ Because ultimately here is God’s promise: Stand where God has called you to stand, go where God has called you to go, be who God has called you to be, do what God asks you to do and God will bless your life. It’s a decision. It’s a decision of the heart.

God gives usa new heart. This master physician, somehow, deep inside, takes out that heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh. Warm, alive, pumping life through us.

It is fantastic to be with you again today. I wonder what your memory is like. If I mention the name Louis Washkansky and the date, the 3rd of December 1967, would you be able to remember what that was about? Could you tell me exactly why that is significant in history? I have to tell you if you can remember that, you are very good. You’re pretty good because I had to look it up on the Internet.

Now, let me thrown in another name: Dr. Christiaan Barnard. Now, there’s a name that a few of us know. Of course, he was the man that pioneered heart transplants, and, of course, Louis Washkansky, on the 3rd of December 1967, was the first person ever to receive a heart transplant. We all watched it on the news, on the black-and-white TV, and each night, as the news came on at 6 p.m., we were hoping so much that Louis Washkansky would live. Well, he did live but only for 18 days.

He died, not because the operation was a failure — the operation, actually, amazingly, had been a success. He died of double pneumonia, and the reason he did is that the medication to stop the immune system from rejecting the heart meant that he also could not fight off other diseases. And so pneumonia killed him.

Now, the big issue with heart transplants and kidney transplants and lung transplants is not so much the operation. They’ve got that sorted. The big issue in those early days was the fact that the body knows that this heart doesn’t belong to it, so the body’s immune system treats it as an invasion and as an attack. And so the body rejects it. The big issue was that the doctors had to figure out how to deal with this. Now, by and large, they have that sorted. Heart transplants are not exactly routine, but there are today literally thousands of people walking around on this Earth with someone else’s heart inside them. That’s awesome. Isn’t it?

I remember a couple of years back going to the funeral of a close friend of mine, whose name was Bob. Bob died because he had a congenital disease that impacted on his heart and his lungs. In fact, his father had died of that. One of his other brothers had died of that, and at Bob’s funeral, I met his remaining surviving brother, Sam. Twelve weeks before the funeral, Sam — who had the same condition — had had a heart and lung transplant. Now, I have to say I could not believe, meeting this man for the first time, that only three months before he had been close to death’s door and they’d cut him open. They had found just at the last minute an appropriate donor, and he had this transplant. He had color in his cheeks. He was well. He said, “Look, I feel fantastic.”

So here it is: someone who is dying of heart disease needs to firstly decide to have a heart transplant. Secondly, the big issue is finding suitable donors. Thirdly, they have to do the operation successfully, and finally, the doctors have to treat this rejection. Sam said to me at this funeral, he said, “Look, before, it was as though I was walking around on the bottom of a swimming pool — on the deep end of a pool. I could barely breath. It was like all this weight was on top of me.” And now, he said, “Now, I have a new life.”

The reason heart disease is so bad is that the heart pumps blood. It pumps life through our body. And when it’s not working properly, it drains the life out of us. And, ultimately, it ends in a premature death.

Solomon, the King of Israel some 3,000 years ago, was one of the wisest men who ever walked the Earth. And he knew this was true of us emotionally and spiritually, not just physically. One of the books that he wrote in the Old Testament in the Bible was the Book of Proverbs. There are 31 chapters in that book, and he talks about the heart 69 times. In Proverbs 4:23 he writes this: “Above all else, guard your heart because the heart is the wellspring of your life.” Is that wonderful? Above all, “Guard your heart because the heart is the wellspring of your life.”

Now, it’s true, physically, we know that, but my hunch is not everybody has admitted it to themselves, physically. We need to admit to ourselves that this principle of a diseased heart ruining our lives is true of us emotionally and spiritually as well.

This week is the last message in a series of four messages. I call the series, New Heart, New Life. And, today, we’re going to talk about getting a new heart. Why bother? What’s wrong with my old heart? It’s not that bad, really. Here’s some of the other things that Solomon says about the heart:

– in Prov. 6:14, he says that “We plot evil in our hearts.”
– Prov. 12:25, he says that “An anxious heart weighs you down.”
– in Prov. 18:12, he says, “Before his downfall, a man’s heart is proud.”

Do any of those things sound vaguely familiar? And when we talk about what’s going on in our hearts — our fundamental attitudes, our weaknesses, and our strengths — it takes a lot of courage sometimes to really admit what’s going on in our heart, for sometimes we do plot evil in our heart. Sometimes, we are anxious, and it weighs us down. Sometimes, we are arrogant and proud. And if we recognize any of those things in ourselves, come on. Those things are draining us of life. Those things are robbing us of the life that we can have.

In Prov. 21:2, Solomon writes this: “All a man’s ways seem right to him. But God weighs the heart.” Isn’t that the truth? We are masters of self-delusion: “I’m okay, Jack. Well, I’m not that bad, really.” When all along, a diseased heart, a diseased soul, is robbing us of life, an abundant life. Question: what about you? Chugging along through life, is it possible that your are ignoring the signs of spiritual and emotional heart disease? Are you living a vibrant, vital life, or is something draining you of that life?

I believe there are so many people who say, “I’m a Christian,” but they find themselves in exactly that position — a diseased heart, because we can easily ignore what’s going on in our hearts. It’s hard to confront. We believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We believe in Him, and so we know there’s something wrong deep inside of us, and we sense this guilt. And it makes it even harder to turn to Him and say, “Lord, I have this guilt. Something is wrong in my heart.”

In today’s message, I truly believe that God wants to give someone a new heart, and this first step — like the difference between Bob and Sam — is saying, “I need a new heart.” Bob died because he chose not to go for a transplant. If he had chosen a transplant, he may well still be here today. But it’s a metaphor; it’s a picture. Sam, on the other hand, chose life. He chose a new heart. We need to admit our disease. If we are being drained of life, we have to say, “Hang on, there’s something wrong here.”

What about you? Do you want a new heart today? Do you want God to take away that thing that’s not working in you, that’s robbing you of life? Why don’t you chew on that for a moment, and we’ll come back and look at exactly that — a new heart — after this short break.

We’re talking today, on Christianity Works, about getting a new heart. And I ask you the question again: is something draining you of life. Is today the day that God wants to give you a new heart?

The symptoms of physical heart disease are pain and drain. People feel pain sometimes in their chest — little niggling pangs in their hearts, often men around about my age, actually — and they ignore those pains at their peril, because those pains could well be the harboring of heart disease, of a heart attack. The other thing that they often notice is drain. Their energy is drained. Somehow if the heart is not pumping properly — pumping the oxygen through our blood to the cells in our body — we feel very tired and very drained. The same is true of emotional and spiritual heart disease. We feel pain and drain. We feel pain somewhere inside. We feel drained emotionally and spiritually.

Do you want a new heart today? Because if we ignore these symptoms, we ignore them at our peril. We’re going to go today to the Book of Ezekiel. If you have a Bible, grab it. If you don’t, that’s fine. I’ll be reading some stuff out of Ezekiel Chapter 30.

Ezekiel was an Old Testament prophet. He was prophesying around 586 BC. This is the time that God chose to exile Israel, God’s chosen people — the country, the nation to whom He had given Jerusalem to, to whom He had given the temple. These are God’s chosen people. And God’s chosen people chose to reject Him. And so, in response, God said, “I really would rather bless you. I really would rather be kind to you, but there’s an issue here. All the other nations around know that you are my chosen people, and by doing that horrible things that you have done, you have profaned My Name.

Look at what He says in Ezekiel 36:16: “The Word of the Lord came to me,” — this is the prophet Ezekiel — “‘Men, when the house of Israel lived on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds. Their conduct in my sight was like the uncleanness of a woman in her menstrual period. So I poured out my wrath upon them for the blood that they had shed on the land and for the idols which they had used to defile it with. I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries. In accordance with their conduct and their deeds, I judged them.’”

That’s why God kicked them out of Israel. That’s why God let the Babylonians come and tear the whole thing down, because God’s people had rejected God. They were masters of self delusion. These people were deceiving themselves. It was the whole ‘eat, drink, and be merry,’ and keep God at a distance: “After all, we’re God’s chosen people. We’ll worship other things,” just like you and I can choose to worship other things. We tend not to choose idols, by and large, these days. We choose other things, which is money or wealth or career or gratification or entertainment. There’s so many things that we can choose to worship and put ahead of God. That’s what these people did, and so God punished them to uphold His name in the known world. And He sent them out, and they were dispersed.

Now, there’s a beautiful passage that’s coming up in Ezekiel 30, beginning at verse 24, because now Ezekiel — after this dispersion, after this punishment — Ezekiel is prophesying what God is going to do next. And this is where you and I have a lot of encouragement, something really to listen to: “I will take you from the nations. I will gather you from all the countries to which you’ve been spread, and I’ll bring you back into your own land. I’ll sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from your uncleanness, and from all the idols, I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you and a new Spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then, you will live in the land that I gave to your ancestors, and you will be my people, and I will be your God.”

I love the Proverb that Solomon wrote in Prov. 21:2 where He says this: “All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart.” We — like this nation, Israel, way back then, two-and-a-half odd thousand years ago — we can deceive ourselves and go on living. Someone we know something’s not right. Somehow we know there’s pain. We know there’s drain, and yet, we just go on and deceive ourselves: “All a man’s ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart.”

We know we’re not happy. We know we’re not contented. We know there’s no peace. Joy somehow eludes us. We know we should have victory in who Jesus is, but “Well, I don’t know. Everything is in a mess. Relationships are in a mess but….” Come on. Let’s call a spade a spade here. Heart disease is heart disease. That’s what Israel had. They were God’s chosen people. God’s chosen people can have heart disease. And He says to them in Chapter 36, verse 26: “I will take your heart of stone out.” You see? This is a heart transplant.

What do you do with a diseased heart? You take it out, and your replace it with a healthy one, and then you deal with the whole issue of rejection. That’s exactly what God is talking about here. Look at it: “A new heart I will give you. A new Spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” What an amazing picture — a heart of stone. You couldn’t imagine a greater contradiction: cold, hard, unfeeling, uncaring, brutal. Sometimes we have hearts like that. A real heart is a vital organ. It’s a muscle with four chambers that two billion times in the average lifetime pumps blood. Two billion times it contracts in the average lifetime to pump blood, to pump life in the body. But a stone is dead. A stone is lifeless. And if our lives aren’t coming together, if somehow we aren’t living our the victory that Jesus died to give us, maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we have hearts of stone.

God says, “I will take away your heart of stone. I will give you a heart transplant, but first, I have to take the old one out.” What about you? Are you game? Pretty scary having your chest cut open to get a heart transplant. Well, that’s what God is saying: “I want to give you a new heart.”

Are you aching for a new heart? Are you aching for a tender, soft, gentle heart that God can give you? Well, the first step is to let go of my diseased heart, for you to let go of your diseased heart. And the beauty of this is we don’t have to sit around and wait for a donor. God is the donor. God is the one doing the promising here. God says, “I will give you a new heart.” God is the source of all life. All life. And the Lord, our God, is saying — maybe to you today — “I want to give you a new heart, because when I give you a new heart, I give you a new life.”

I remember someone asked me once, “You’re not one of those ‘Born-again’ Christians, are you?” And Jesus says there’s only one type of Christian: unless you are born again from above, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And being born again means laying down the old self. It means saying, “Take my heart of stone, Dear God, and give me a heart of flesh.”

There are people who have gone to church for years, for decades, who have never done that. There are people who call themselves Christians, who have never given their hearts to God and said, “Give me a new one. I want to be born again.” Have you? Have you done that?

When we hear that phrase ‘a change of heart,’ what it really means is that we’ve been in a deep, entrenched position about something, and then something miraculous happens. Something deep happens, and we turn around completely. That’s what a change of heart is. It’s a big turnaround. Being born again means this: it means saying, “Dear God, I know. I know that there’s something wrong inside of me. I know that there’s this thing called sin that I can’t get rid of, and I’m coming to the Cross, and I want to leave it all behind. I want a change of heart. I want a new one. I am a sinner. I’m utterly incapable of healing myself. Lord, I cry out to you today: give me a new heart!”

If you’ve never done that before, pray this with me now: Father, I have heard your message. I have heard your call. I lay my old self down. I lay everything of the past and everything of me down in front of You. And Father, today, I want to be born again. I turn from all the things I know they’re wrong. Father, forgive me for them, forgive me that I’ve left it this long. But I want a new heart. I believe that Jesus died for me. I believe that I am forgiven through Him. I believe that I have a new life, and today, Father, I ask you for a new heart, in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

You know, Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The very first of those beatitudes — you know, on the Sermon of the Mount where He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek,” — the very first one is He says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” because they are the ones who dare to admit that they need help and they are the ones who will inherit the kingdom of heaven. We’re going to break for a minute, and we’ll be back again shortly to wrap this up.

Today, on Christianity Works, we’re talking about having a change of heart, getting a new heart. God promised us. This was to His chosen people, people who had turned against Him. He said, “A new heart I will give you, and a new Spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and make you follow My statutes and be careful to observe My ordinances.”

We observed at the beginning of the program that the key problem with a physical heart transplant is that our immune system rejects the heart. They perfected the operation long before they dealt with this whole thing of rejection. And people still died because they didn’t sort this immune system thing out. Turns out that our flesh, our body, rejects things that are foreign to it. The same thing is true spiritually and emotionally. God puts a new heart in us, and our flesh is going to act up. Our flesh is going to say, “Well, I don’t think I really want this new heart. I was used to the old way. I like doing the stuff that I used to do.”

And the devil is going to act up too. The devil is really happy with defeated Christians. The devil is really happy with you if you just go to church, and you sit in the pew and you kind of say, “I believe,” but you never make a ripple in this world for Jesus. He’s really happy with us. But the moment we repent, the moment we say, “I want to turn away from this,” the moment we say, “God, I want to be born again. I want to believe this Jesus. I want to have a new life and a new heart,” well, he’s going to attack us. God figured that out, too. It’s not a surprise to God. And in these verses is God’s plan to deal with our rejection of the new heart because He says, “I will put my Spirit within you.”

God’s Holy Spirit is His plan to deal with the rejection: “I will put My Spirit within you to make you follow Me and obey Me.” Now, an initial reaction to that might be to say, “Fantastic. So God brainwashes me. So God coerces me. So God forces me to observe His statutes and be careful to observe His ordinances.” It’s not it at all. The apostle Paul writes in Philippians 2:13 to end this: “For it is God who is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for His good pleasure.”

So here’s the picture: God gives us a new heart. This master physician, somehow deep inside, takes out that heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh — warm, alive, pumping life through us. Then, He deals with the flesh rejecting the new heart by pouring His Holy Spirit in us to give us the strength, the power, and the desire, the will to live for Him.

The Hebrew word that God uses in the Old Testament to talk about His Holy Spirit is ruach. It means literally a rushing wind. The same is true in the New Testament. The Greek word pneuma, which again means a rushing wind, moving air. We get the word pneumatic from it. It’s almost as though God is saying, “Not only will I take the old diseased, heart of stone out, not only will I put in a new heart of flesh, but I will give you a new breath. You will have completely new life.” And then little bit and little bit and little bit, as we walk with Him day by day, with a new heart pumping new life into us, with a new Spirit giving us a new breath, we will experience a new life.

“I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly,” said Jesus. A life where we laugh, where we experience joy and happiness, a life where we cry, a life where we work, a life where we need help. Life. You know, a heart is a piece of flesh. It moves. It’s not solid like stone. It’s alive, and that’s what God is promising us here and now.

But what do I have to do? What’s my part in this? Listen to it again: “A new heart I will give you and a new Spirit I will put within you, and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my Spirit within you.” If I look back at those two men I was talking about earlier on — Bob and Sam — Bob chose not to have a heart transplant. Sam chose to have a heart transplant, and he is walking around on this Earth a very healthy man today.

We have a decision to make. We need to decide — no matter where we are in our walk, whether we’ve never committed our lives to Jesus or whether we’ve been going to church a long time and still never actually taken the step of being born again, of asking Jesus into our lives and committing our lives to Him. Of asking Jesus for a new heart, we have a decision to make. We have to admit a diseased heart — no matter where we’re at — and say, “Lord, I don’t want it anymore.” That’s what repentance is. “I want to turn away from this. I don’t want it anymore.” And then we cry out, “Lord, I want to be born again. Take my heart of stone. Give me a new heart. Give me a heart of flesh, and then, Lord, fill me afresh with Your Holy Spirit to stay.”

From then on, we walk quietly, faithfully with Him every day. We pray. We read this love letter, the Bible. We spend time with Him. We honor Him in what we do, just the best that we can. And we have struggles sometimes, and His power comes because His Spirit is here. New heart means new life. New Spirit in us means a new breath, a new life. Do you want a new life? That is open to you here and now. All we need do is ask.