Heart Renovation Required (Matthew 15:1-20)

[00:00:05] Thank you for listening to the Calvary Church Podcast. For more information about our church, please visit calvary.com. For more resources from our lead pastor, Nate Holdridge, please visit jesusfamous.com. Teaching today is our lead pastor, Nate Holdridge. Nate Holdridge All right. Good morning, church. Great to see all of you today. Let's take out our Bibles this morning. We're going to be in

[00:00:31] Matthew chapter 15. Matthew chapter 15 as we continue our study verse by verse through the book of Matthew. How many of you guys were at the fall festival yesterday with the families that were here? We had a great time yesterday. I was Buddy the Elf. Christina was Buddy's girlfriend, Jovi. We had a great time. It was outrageous. And if that was your first time with our church family, I'm so sorry that that was your first impression of us. But now we're going to get into the

[00:01:01] word together. We're looking at Matthew 15 verse 1 to 20 this morning. Let's start out with the first two verses which sort of set up this entire episode and teaching from Jesus. It says in verse 1, then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said,

[00:01:26] Lord, why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat. Lord, we come before you this morning and as we get a chance to hear you reply to that question from the council from Jerusalem. We pray, Lord, that our hearts would be open and ready

[00:01:54] to receive, Lord, from you. What we want, Lord God, is the heart renovation that comes through being born again but also follows being born again as you continue your steadfast work in changing us and transforming us into the image of Christ. We want to put on Christ day after day.

[00:02:19] And Lord, that's what we want. We don't want to settle for the little religiosities that the scribes and Pharisees caught up in. And so, Lord, we are asking for your help as we interact with your word this morning. Thank you, Lord, for the gathering of the saints. Thank you for this beautiful place that you've given to us. Thank you for a wonderful time of worship in song. Thank you,

[00:02:44] Lord, for our brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you for a great kids ministry and thank you for the hospitality. Lord, thank you for all of it. And we ask now that you'd meet us here in your book. In Jesus name, we pray together. Amen. Amen. Well, later in the story, of Jesus, there comes a time, and many of you know this episode, when the religious leaders are

[00:03:12] questioning Jesus. They are trying to trap him in theological quandaries and he easily dismisses with the questions that they put forth to him. But then finally, there comes a scribal lawyer. He seems to ask a sincere question to the Lord. Keep in mind that when a scribal lawyer is speaking, you're talking about

[00:03:42] a representative of those who are serious about God, a representative of those who want to love God. And this man asked Jesus, what is the greatest commandment? And Jesus said, it is to love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. Or to quote Matthew's,

[00:04:11] or excuse me, Mark's rendition, your heart, mind, soul, and strength, your body to love God in that way. And when Jesus said that to that scribal lawyer, Jesus was not making that up on the spot in that moment. He was quoting from the book of Deuteronomy chapter 6, which was one of the most central passages

[00:04:38] in the Israelite mentality. They had a saying, Deuteronomy 6, 4, the great Shema, the hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. And then right after it, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. So when Jesus said that, the scribal

[00:05:02] lawyer said to Jesus, I approve. Well done. Good answer to that question. What is the greatest? To love God with everything within you. There's something about that command, though, that is hauntingly searching of our inner person. Because it leaves each of us asking the question,

[00:05:31] do I love God with all of my heart and soul and mind and strength? And I'll tell you, humanity sometimes doesn't like, we sometimes don't like what we find when we answer that question. Sometimes we discover a flatness before God, a disinterest in God. Sometimes we find an apathy

[00:06:00] related to God. Sometimes when we search within, we say, I want to do that. I want to love God with everything that I've got. But that's just not my natural disposition. It's just not where I'm at right now. I feel far from that beautiful ideal. And when we start feeling that way as human beings,

[00:06:22] we respond in one of three ways. The first way that we might respond is through lowering the bar in a way that looks like we are raising the bar. That's what the Pharisees did. We will create little religious or religiosities that look as if we are loving God. Make it look as if we are ultra devoted to God.

[00:06:51] But in reality, as Jesus will say in this passage, our hearts are far from him. These are religious substitutes for a real authentic relationship with the living God. The Bible equates God to an all consuming fire. When you're in a relationship with him, it's like you approach him and you're altered.

[00:07:15] You're changed. You're like Isaiah when he saw the glory of the Lord undone by the one that you're interacting with. But so often, because we don't want to approach God in that honesty and to see him in his holiness, we create like the Pharisees did little religious steps that make us feel like we love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. Sometimes we convince ourselves it's happening.

[00:07:44] Sometimes we even convince others that it's happening. But that's one response. Another response that some will give themselves to is just a total honesty with what's happening within. John said in 1 John chapter 2 that when the love of the world is present with us, the love of the Father, God, is not there. And he said that the love of the world is the desire, the longing, the lust to be something or to feel

[00:08:14] something or to have something. And so often what people will do is look within and say, that love for God is not there. I want something different. I want to be something. I want to have stuff. I want to feel things and have experiences. That's just where my heart is at. My heart is dead towards God. So I'm going to chase out after what my heart really is. I'm going to be honest. And I'm going to follow after

[00:08:41] the heart that is there. There is a third approach, however, and it's the one that I'm going to champion today that I think Jesus is going to set us up well for in his teaching. And it's the person who responds by saying, my heart is not where I want it to be. That's because it needs an inner change and transformation. It needs that transformation in an ongoing way. So I'm going to continue to go to the

[00:09:09] great physician, Jesus, my Lord. I'm going to continue to walk with him so that he can change this heart from the inside out and make me something new and newer and newer and newer as the years tick by. That's the response or these are the responses that Jesus is going to hold out today. If you were comparing this passage with Luke 15, you would say there's the response of the elder brother in the

[00:09:37] parable of the prodigal son. I'm doing everything right. There's the response of the prodigal son who says, forget it. I'm just going to go do what I feel like doing. And then there is the gospel response that says, both of those brothers are inside my heart and I need Jesus to cleanse that out. And so I'm going to go to him day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year that he

[00:10:01] might change and transform my life. Now, just a backdrop to this passage. We're not dropping into Matthew 15 without any backstory. What we saw last week is that we left Jesus ministering in the region of the Gennesaret and every person who came to him with uncleanness and touch the hem of his garment was made

[00:10:27] clean. Matthew is presenting Jesus as the reverse contagion, the reverse pollutant. People come to him unclean. When they touch him, he does not become unclean, but they become like him. They become cleansed. And that's really the idea that Jesus is going to get into in this passage. Come to me.

[00:10:49] You got a heart that's messed up. You got an inside that is messed up. Come to me and I will make you as myself. I will cleanse you from within. All right. So the story, what's happening in this passage? Well, it says in verse one and two that a group of Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem come to visit

[00:11:14] Jesus. The fact that they're from Jerusalem means that they're there to audit Jesus. They are the official delegation. Like, you know, there's the Pharisees and then there's the Jerusalem Pharisees. And they show up to weigh in on what they're seeing with Jesus. And even though Jesus had just fed thousands of people miraculously, walked on water and calmed a raging storm and cleansed all of

[00:11:41] these people of their illnesses, they come to town and their big knit to pick is that Jesus's disciples are not washing their hands before they eat a meal. Now what's happening here? Is this a hygienic, like, ew, the disciples are gross kind of thing? You know, I mean, seven of them at least were fishermen. That's nasty. Like, you need to wash your hands. I was about to say, wash your feet. That'd be good too.

[00:12:08] Before you eat a meal, you need to wash your hands. No, this is not a hygienic thing. This is a spiritual thing. You see, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, God had said that when the priests came to the tabernacle or the temple to serve God, they were to wash their hands, not just for hygienic reasons, but in a

[00:12:31] highly ceremonial way. It was a religious cleansing before God in the tabernacle or temple for the priests. The scribes and the Pharisees, however, they were part of a movement that said, we want to be ultra devoted to God. We love God. And so what we want is for every home in Israel to be like a miniature temple

[00:12:55] precincts. And so before we eat our meals in the privacy of our own homes, we're going to go through the same elaborate cleansing ceremony that the priests go through in the tabernacle or the temple. We're going to go through that in our homes as a sign of our love and devotion to God.

[00:13:20] They see the disciples, Jesus' followers, not doing this customary tradition of the elders, and they ask Jesus about it. This is like them asking something like, why aren't your disciples doing the thing that demonstrates that they love God? Don't they love God? Why aren't they doing

[00:13:45] this thing? All right. So we always know that when the Pharisees come a knocking, Jesus is going to have a wild answer. He's going to get right to the core of the matter. So let's read and see what he says to them. First, I'm going to call this him saying, this is the incorrect solution. That's what you guys have come up with, Pharisees, the incorrect solution of dead devotion. It says in verse three,

[00:14:08] he answered them. And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and mother and said, whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God.

[00:14:31] He need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites. Well, did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines, the commandments

[00:14:58] of men. Okay. Clearly Jesus was not impressed with the hand-washing ceremony at all. They say, why aren't your disciples obeying the tradition of the elders, washing their hands in a certain way? And Jesus fires back with, why are you breaking the word of God itself? Your tendency to lower the bar by making

[00:15:25] it look like you're actually raising the bar. Look how spiritual we are, Jesus said, is causing people to break, verse three, the commandment of God's word. It's a heavy allegation from Jesus. So he's ready with an illustration, an example of the way that they do this. So Jesus trots out the fifth commandment.

[00:15:49] You shall honor your father and your mother. I mean, it's written on the tablets of stone. It's one of the big ones to honor your parents. And Jesus comes along and says, that's what's written. And we have a serious warning attached to that commandment. Jesus said, because the word says that a person who doesn't do that is deserving of death. So there's a severe warning attached to the command to honor

[00:16:16] your father and mother. But then Jesus said, but you saying to the scribes and Pharisees, you give people a way out of honoring their father and mother, because you've created this system where they can dedicate their belongings, their homes, their finances to the Lord, and then go back to their parents and say, I'm sorry, I'd love to help you in your time of need. I can see that you probably need

[00:16:45] a place to live in your older age. I would love to be there for you, but I can't help you because I've already dedicated these things to God. In Mark's gospel, it becomes even clearer. There was a word for it. It's called Corbin. It was the word dedicated. It means that you could cruise around and somehow the details are debated. Somehow you could go around and say, this is Corbin. That is Corbin. My bank account

[00:17:14] is Corbin. And you could still use all of it for yourself, but you could tell your parents that it was already tied up for God. And you know, of course, who wins between Yahweh and a person? It's always Yahweh. And so the Pharisees had set up this system. Jesus rebukes it. Your traditions have made void

[00:17:39] the word of God. Clearly my intention, clearly Yahweh's intention is that you would care for your parents, but you have found every loophole that you could made loopholes for people. You've voided the scripture itself. This is astounding, especially when you consider who Jesus is and some of the things that he said. I mean, we've already confronted some of the passages where Jesus

[00:18:05] alludes to the fact that our allegiance to him has to be bigger than our allegiance to our families. That sometimes there will even be division in families because of someone in the family being completely devoted to Christ. Listen, Jesus understands that there is division in family that

[00:18:28] stems from an allegiance to Jesus. But he also understands that there is a division in the family that sometimes stems from devotion in Jesus. In other words, sometimes we're good to our families because of who Jesus is in our lives. And sometimes there's division because of what we believe about Jesus. Jesus understands that these guys were not devoted to God, but they were actually, these rules

[00:18:56] were made because they were devoted to themselves. Every night before I go to bed, I have this little tradition since all three of my daughters are adults now, young adults, and they're scattered throughout California. I have this little tradition of texting each one of them, good night. But I, what I do is I give them a little log of what happened in my day. And then my hope is that they'll then later, because

[00:19:24] they go to bed after I do, they will then text me back and they'll say good night and they'll give me a log of what they did in their day. And sometimes it's a little video message I'm sending. Sometimes it's an audio message I'm sending. Sometimes it's a text that I'm hammering out, but a lot of times it's an auto dictated text message. You know, I turn on the little, I push the little microphone and I just say the text and then it transcribes it for me. And usually I'm so tired by the end of the day,

[00:19:50] I don't read what it put and I just hit send and hope for the best, you know, kind of thing. And a few weeks ago, I woke up in the morning and I'll wake up and I'll have a few text messages for my three girls. And I woke up in the morning and my youngest was laughing at my text message, because at one point what I said to her was, I love you so much, but it dictated it as I love me

[00:20:18] so much. It's like Jesus is looking at these Pharisees saying, I see what you're doing. You're trying to convey through all these practices that you love God so much, but the reality is you love yourself so much. The whole Corbin loophole is a proof of that reality. They were hurting others

[00:20:43] through their practices. Frederick Dale Bruner said it this way, there's a devotion to God that hurts God because it hurts people. Martin Luther, when he pinned his theses to the door of the chapel, he rebuked in many of them, the indulgences that people were buying from the Roman Catholic Church. And the reason that he rebuked so many of them is because so many who were buying them were poor.

[00:21:12] They should have been spending their money to care for their families, to care for others. It was a ripping off of the people of God in the name of God. And lest we think that we're incapable of this kind of thing today. Let me give a few examples. Imagine a pastor neglecting his family

[00:21:37] for the sake of the ministry. You know, I'm serving God. I'm devoted to God. But in reality, their family is suffering. Imagine someone generously giving to the church or some other worthwhile cause while their aging parents or their debts go unattended. Imagine someone serving at church as much as they possibly can, not because of a love for God, but because they're trying to

[00:22:06] avoid a difficult marriage and life at home. Imagine someone giving the popular trendy current talk about Sabbath and soul care and silence and solitude, good things that I love and preach about, but using them for the rest of their lives as an excuse not to lift a finger for others in the body of Christ.

[00:22:29] Imagine someone with one area of visible holiness, like a man who's preaching about accountability software and all of that in his life, but he's got these glaring character defects that remain unattended. There are ways to present as godly when still there is so much heart renovation that needs

[00:22:55] to occur. And it wasn't only the Corbin rules that hurt people. Every tradition that replaced the commandments of God hurt people. The hand washing requirements became this test of devotion and seriousness. How serious are they about God? How much do they love God? Well, they don't even wash their hands in that ceremonial way before they eat a meal. They must not be God lovers. And we often do

[00:23:19] the same thing. We turn our own preferences or convictions into tests of other people's seriousness about God. The schooling they choose for their children, how they feel about Halloween, what they do with alcohol, what Bible translation they use, worship styles, politics, spiritual gifts. We can find a million things that become the litmus test for others. But not only does this religiosity, this dead

[00:23:48] devotion hurt others, it hurts the self. Jesus knows that. He calls them hypocrites to their faces for the first time in the Gospel of Matthew in verse 7. This is his way of saying you are play-acting a religious role as a cheap substitute for a real relationship with the great I am. Don't you want the real thing?

[00:24:15] I think it was a month ago that they held the Berlin Marathon. And I got a kick out of this, but after it was all over a few days later, someone posted video footage that they'd taken on their cell phones of this fitness influencer who was running in the marathon, but the video was of her on the back of someone's

[00:24:40] motorcycle getting a ride through the Berlin Marathon. You know, a little cheater. And what is that? That's what the Pharisees were doing. Looking like, you can look to me, I'm an example for you to follow, but not actually being that reality for themselves. And the Lord,

[00:25:06] he hates this kind of thing because of what it does to others and what it does to the self. There's a very sobering story in Acts chapter 5 when the church was just barely getting going. When people were caught up in a wave of spirit-led generosity, lots of people were selling homes and land and possessions and giving the proceeds to this brand new movement, this Jesus movement.

[00:25:34] And there was this one couple in the church, their names were Ananias and Sapphira, and they loved the attention that the gift givers were getting. And so what they did is they sold some land, but they're like, we don't want to give all of it. And no one said they had to give any of it. But they said, we don't want to give all of it, but we want people to think that we gave all of it.

[00:26:01] Those people are getting like lots of slaps on the back and high fives. And so we're going to keep some for ourselves secretly, but we're going to give some of it, but act like we gave all of it. But the spirit saw it and told Peter about it. He said, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit? You've not lied to man, but you've lied to God. And both of them fell down dead in front of the church that day. That was a wild church service, you know,

[00:26:31] by the way, I just want to say, you don't want to miss church. You never know what's going to happen. Now that's not what happens all the time whenever there's hypocrisy, but it was one of the first instances. And I think it was God's way of saying, this is serious. This could kill you from the

[00:26:53] inside. And so it must be dealt with. Don't live that incongruent, dichotomized life. Instead, turn to God. You know, God is looking for people who will come to him with their broken heartedness, with their warped heartedness, with their distracted heartedness, and with their sin loving heartedness.

[00:27:22] Read the Psalms. God is interested in honest interaction with himself. He can handle it. He wants us to come to him and say, my heart, it feels far from you right now. Do your surgery in me though, so that I can enter into true change and transformation with you. Okay. The problem is the second half of the passage. So let's read that verse 10 to 20 together. This is where Jesus shows

[00:27:52] the little dead religiosities would never work. It says he called the people to him and said to them, hear and understanding. It's not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a person. Then the disciples came and said to him, do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying? He answered, every plant that my heavenly father has not

[00:28:20] planted will be rooted up. Let them alone. They are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. But Peter said to him, explain the parable to us. And he said, are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach

[00:28:42] and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart. And this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness,

[00:29:06] slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. All right. Having dealt with the dead devotion of the Pharisees, Jesus begins to actually answer their question. The great Shema began with, hear, O Israel. Jesus gathers the crowd and he says,

[00:29:31] hear, hear, and understand. What comes out of the mouth is what actually defiles. These were staggering words if you were an Israelite in that day because you had spent much of your life thinking that contamination was from the outside in. But here Jesus is saying, no, contamination, it's from the inside

[00:29:57] out. To quote a trope of lots of scary movies, the call is coming from inside the house, Jesus is saying. Remember a couple months ago when our youngest daughter June was getting ready to head off to school, we knew we had to get her outfitted with a different car than she had. She had this little hoopty that, you know, could like kind of get around the Monterey Peninsula but was definitely not going to

[00:30:23] be able to drive to LA for college. And so we were like, okay, we'll, we'll look around. And I'm a Honda guy. I don't mean to brag about that, but I'm a Honda guy. And so we were looking around for some used Hondas and I, I thought I found one up in Hayward, this little seedy car lot. And we went up there and you know, we're, we scheduled an appointment to go check it out. And you know, I did some

[00:30:48] research, you know, on how to, how to handle this whole thing. You know, I asked AI, uh, like, what do I do? And, uh, and, and I was acting, you know, really like I knew what I was looking for. You know, I'm like walking around the car and I'm having them like pop the hood and I'm looking at the engine. Like, I've got no idea what I'm looking at, but I'm cruising around and I, I, I went and I, I, I opened up the trunk and I looked in the, um, spare tire compartment, you know, there was a spare tire and

[00:31:17] there was like a little bit of water that was there in the spare tire compartment, you know? And I was kind of like, what's going on here? You know? And the guy was like, well, we just washed the car and some water probably got in there. Well, I told him, I was like, Hey, you know, before I buy this looks great, but before I buy it, I want to take it to a Honda dealer and I'm going to pay him a couple hundred bucks. They're just going to like give it a once over, take a look at things,

[00:31:43] tell me, you know what they see. And I drove it in and the guys there at the shop were like, that's a sweet little deal. Like these, these little Hondas are going like crazy. People love them, you know? And so I pay the money and they, a couple hours later, they come out and the mechanic like looked like white as a ghost, you know? He's like, did you look underneath this car? I'm like, no, I didn't know that was a thing you were supposed to do. He's like, he's like, let me show you

[00:32:08] pictures. And he, he, he said, this is the rustiest car I have ever seen. And he goes through the record. He's like, it's a New York car. It's, it's been on the East coast. It's like, you, this thing is about to fall apart, you know? And I was like, like, how many months are we talking? You know, it's pretty good deal. You know, it's like, no, you do not want this car. And I just loved it. You know, my diagnosis, like there's a little water in the wheel well there, you know? And these

[00:32:37] guys professionally are saying there is so much corrosion. That's what Jesus is saying. It's something like that. Like you guys think you could patch it up with a little hand-washing ceremony? There is, and notice Jesus goes plural on everything. There's murders coming out of the heart. There's slander coming out of the heart. There's adultery coming out of the heart. Sexual immorality

[00:33:01] coming out of the heart. This is Jesus's diagnosis. The disciples were like, Jesus, don't you know the Pharisees? They're, they're pretty offended at what you said. And Jesus seems to have borrowed from his parable about the weeds and the wheat by saying, they're not from the father, those teachers, just leave them alone. I think it's kind of his way of saying dead religiosity is just always going to be

[00:33:28] there. You focus on being the real deal. Don't try to fix everybody else. You come to the Lord yourself. Let him perform that surgery on you. And what he announces is something real simple. What we eat goes into the sewer, but what comes out of our mouths, that's coming from the heart. Now this whole list

[00:33:54] is brutal, showing us that following our heart is not freedom. It's a catastrophe. The heart is the source of the problem. So what was Jesus's answer? They said, why don't your disciples wash? Jesus says something like, because unwashed hands cannot defile them. And the commandments of men cannot cleanse them.

[00:34:19] It's their hearts, which must become clean. All right. Now that's the end of Jesus's sermon. And it would be a very discouraging way to end our time together because basically we've covered the first two responses that people have when they recognize that there's a gap between their actual love for God and what they would love for their love to, to God to be like. We've looked at the dead religion. We've looked at the follow after your heart, but the rest of the

[00:34:48] Bible conveys the correct solution. And it's that God wants to work heart renovation inside of us. He's given the diagnosis, but the rest of scripture gives the remedy. And not just in the New Testament, God had said through the prophet Ezekiel that one day I'm going to give you a new heart and a new spirit. The prophet Jeremiah predicted that a time was coming where God would give a new covenant,

[00:35:18] where God would actually write his law upon our hearts, like changing our internal inward desires so that something else comes out of our lives. Jesus told the religious leader Nicodemus in John chapter 3 that he and others must be born again. Something that Paul expounds on in Titus 3 verse 5

[00:35:45] when he talks about how our conversion leads to the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. That's what we need, regeneration and ongoing renewal from the Spirit of God. It's reaching the heart. Only Jesus can do that. And what happens to us when we believe in Jesus,

[00:36:07] the Bible teaches, is that the Spirit of the Son, Jesus himself, comes to reside inside of us, causing us to cry out. Romans 8, Galatians 4, Abba, Father. In other words, what used to come out was all this stuff Jesus mentions, but what starts coming out is a Godward longing and hope, pushing us in a

[00:36:32] Godward direction. And when that begins to happen in our lives, Jesus by his Spirit starts reversing the whole terrible catalog that he lists there in verse 19 and 20. Evil thoughts begin to be replaced

[00:36:54] with renewed minds with renewed minds that are thinking of pure things, of good things, of righteous things. Murders and all their little offshoots, hatred and vengeance become replaced with sacrificial love, laying down our lives for other people, a longing for personal holiness. Adultery and sexual immorality

[00:37:23] are replaced with this fidelity, this longing for marital faithfulness and an inward holiness of character and life. Right down to the privacy of our sexuality. Thefts are turned into honest labor, hard work, and generous giving. And false witness and slander turn into truth spoken in love. And rather than spread,

[00:37:53] spreading slander about others, celebrating others, praising others, being grateful for the work of God in other people's lives. This happens, though, through an ongoing, honest relationship with him. A surgical and confrontational relationship with the living God.

[00:38:15] A splaying out of the internal before God where he produces, over time, newness of heart. For a great example of what I'm talking about, we can turn to Luke. And not the gospel of Luke, but Luke Skywalker from Star Wars.

[00:38:35] There was a time where Yoda told him, go into the cave there in Dagobah. And there, when he went into the cave, he confronted the darkest recesses of his own heart. This is what the Psalms invite us to do. To pray things like David said, search me, oh God. Know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any grievous way in me. And lead me in the way everlasting.

[00:39:04] He will use the word to do this. He will use the spirit to do this. He'll use confession and the community and suffering and discipline to do this transforming work. But he wants us to, with honesty, come to him. I have an image in my mind, and it's of a partly renovated home. Half the home renovated, half the home in desperate need of renovation.

[00:39:31] The resources are there for that renovation to occur. But the family living in the home is contented. We're happy living in a half-renovated house. Jesus is looking at us and saying, I want to renovate your entire heart. I want you to, I want to bring you more fully into the reality of loving God with your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

[00:39:58] Or if I could say it like this, loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And so often there's a gap between what we want, that love for him, and our experience and reality. Don't respond by covering it up with legalism and dead religiosity. Look at how much I love God. Fake it till I make it.

[00:40:23] Don't respond by saying, I'm just going to follow the dictates of my heart that are contrary to God. Instead, say, Lord, there's a gap. You see it. I see it. Search me. Change me. As David said in Psalm 51, create in me a clean heart. Oh God, do that work in me. This is why we go to church. This is why we read the book.

[00:40:52] This is why we pray. Not because we're holy, good, righteous people, but because we want him to do his surgical thing in us. Amen. Thank you for listening. For more information about our church, please visit calvary.com. For more teaching from our lead, Pastor Nehal, just please visit jesusfamous.com.