Taylor, Tom: Skyland Conference 1990-07 ~ Consecration-The Heart

Sometimes you have to kick them a good kick. But anyhow, I am glad to be with you. And as I said last night, glad to be with David and all these things. And you know, I've really changed. I've had a change of heart in the last six years. I hardly indulge in any repartee at all anymore. I'm becoming like George Bush, milder and softer as times go on. I'm probably going to change my word on a few things too, but anyhow. Anyhow, I'd like to make an announcement of my own. I was listening to one of the Disch Island tapes in my car the other day, one of the talent night tapes, and just accidentally it turned on at the place where we were having harmonica music by Mr. Goyena and George Walker and myself. Great stuff it was. And I haven't had a chance to see Mr. Goyena yet, but I mean, I've seen him and talked to him, but I'm sure he has his instrument nearby, and I'm sure if we have a talent night this week, you'll want to join me again, but there may be some other harmonica person who'd like to play with us. Mr. Walker isn't here, and we're not a select society, so let me say that if you play the harmonica, I don't mean if you have one, I mean if you play one, and then if you have one, and you know, if you play one but don't have one, don't say anything to us. But if you play one and have one, you could join us, I'm just sure, don't you think, Art? We'd be glad for company, and it might add something, we could maybe do something from The Messiah or something like that. Uh, we can do some of Larry's music, which is pretty high tony stuff these days, but just thought I'd mention that in passing. And it's always good to be prepared for those things in advance. Tonight I want to read in Proverbs chapter four. I'm talking about the consecration of the whole person, and I tried to emphasize last night, largely out of Galatians two and other passages, the importance of letting your whole life be set apart for God. I said we're just got to remember that we're saved and we're alive by grace, that we might live for God. And an awful lot of our difficulties would be resolved if we lived in the proximity to the Lord Jesus, in which we could say honestly our lives were set apart for him. Now, please note that when you were born again, he did set you apart. He did a perfect work. We are his. There's no question about that. The question is on our performance level, as we demonstrate in the reality of life that we are his. We're born again through faith in the Son of God, and God, by the blood of Jesus, sets us apart. We're his children, and that's the way he sees us and will be his children eternally, for which we thank God. But the way in which we demonstrate that in this world shows our allegiance to the Lord and enables us to be honoring to him and helpful to one another. So the challenge is not to make yourself a big name in heaven. The challenge is to live for the glory of God on earth where we now are. And in connection with what our brother said this morning, I will emphasize that a high degree of commitment in which we know that he loved us and gave himself for us, and having been touched by that loving and forgiving love, we in turn, as we read in Second Corinthians five, yearn to live for him. And so last night I emphasized the concept of setting your whole life apart for God. And then, if you'll see in my notes, I've broken the life down into various segments. Don't touch on everything, but just various segments. And the first of those relates to the heart, and I'm reading in Proverbs four at verse twenty three. Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Put away from thee a forward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee. Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand, nor to the left. Remove thy foot from evil. But in particular, verse twenty three: keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Let's pray again. We thank you, our Father, for the fellowship we've shared today, and we pray that indeed the Lord Jesus might be glorified, lifted up, exalted, set on high, and that we might have the joy of praising him, not only while we're here as a company, but as we go to our homes and our meetings and all the places in the world that the Spirit of God will let us go, that our hearts might reflect and radiate the truths of knowing Christ. And we know, our Father, that growth is a slow process. We pray you'd help us to be willing to yield ourselves to the Word and the Spirit and to grow by degrees in accord with the will of the Lord Jesus, but that we'd not be lazy about it either, and would have a sense of deep commitment to the Lord Jesus and to his Word and the fellowship of his people. So bless us as we think about these things tonight, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. Now keep your heart with all diligence. Easier said than done. When I was a little boy, I was known for crying too much. It commonly, the common term is a ball baby, I think, but I was a little boy in a tough world, so you can understand how it went. And more than once in my youthful days, I took a solemn oath that I would not cry anymore. More than once. I started earlier than I can remember, and it's one thing to say you're not going to cry anymore, and it's another thing not to do it. And I take a solemn oath, even marked it with blood a couple times, that I wouldn't cry anymore, and I'd be squalling within an hour or so, due to some legitimate cause, no doubt. I am still a weepy sort of fellow. I read these things about people's lives and how God has touched them, and tears come to my eyes pretty quick. I hear about some disaster, and I cry. I see a box turtle run over on eighty one and I feel like weeping for him too. I'm easily moved to tears like that. So it's one thing to say to yourself, I'm going to keep my heart with all diligence, it's another thing to do it. It's easy to make solemn resolves, but it's another matter to carry them out. And I would say right away, don't make any solemn resolves that aren't made in yieldedness to the spirit and in agreement with the word of God. Don't do that. Don't say, I'm never going to get mad again. Uh, that's a good way to get angry in just a few minutes about something or else. Don't make any solemn resolves that aren't in keeping with the power that the word of God gives you. Ecclesiastes says, if you make a vow to God and you can't keep it, you shouldn't have made it in the first place. And the emphasis is very clear along that line. So when we talk with regard to the fact of keeping your heart, you don't sit back and say, yes, sir, from now on my heart is going to go just perfect. You don't really work it that way, but what you do is you say, Lord, I want to honor you with all of my life, and one of the things I want to do is to guard my heart, to guard my heart, and that's where I am this evening. Now, by heart we mean, and you know, this is complicated, so brace yourselves, by heart we mean the emotional center of you that expresses itself outwardly. Isn't that complicated? Yes, yes. Well, we're certainly not talking about the physical thing. I know a fellow years ago, when they started transplanting hearts, was worried what would happen if they had to transplant one to him and he got the heart of a sinner. You know, he made a big issue of it at the youth thing. He said, you know, suppose they translated, he said, well, it really, when we talk about believing on the Lord in your heart, it's not the thing that's pumping blood within you, it's the emotional center of what you really are outwardly to others. The soul is the seat of all emotions. The soul responds to God. The heart is the external expression of emotion, and that responds to men and to women. And so here's somebody playing volleyball, they dive for the ball and almost kill themselves, letting it bounce off their head to make a point and do anything. We say that person has heart, and what we mean by that is that that person has a strong emotional inner response that moves outward. And when the writer says, keep your heart, the heart, like many other organs of the body, is used to describe the inner part of you that responds outwardly in the world about you. It'll have a response to God too, because your hands have that also, but that's what the heart is. In the scripture, when the writer gets talking about feeling strong pity towards people, he talks about the bowels or the kidneys or the inner part, wherever those things are, I don't really know, but they're below the heart someplace, I think. He talks about them along those lines. Hearts and inner parts, because you feel a thing within yourself, and we often speak of reactions like that, that you feel a thing within yourself. I'll say I have a strong feeling in the pit of my stomach that I ought to go and have more ice cream tonight. An emotional feeling built along those lines. Actually, I don't need anything more to eat today. I just had wonderful meals, praise the Lord. I enjoyed every bite of them too, and because that, I'd like to keep that record intact, so I'm probably out of a snack tonight so I can enjoy that also and not have any gaps in my food record. Doesn't that make sense to you? Not have any gaps in my food record, but we'll have to see how it goes as far as time is concerned. But that's the thing that we work with in this matter. When the writer says, keep your heart with all diligence, he means keep the inner part of you that responds in our world, keep it, guard it, protect it, watch it in a very, very powerful way. And it's one of those things that can't be done with medicine. It has to be done with godly discipline, yieldedness to the word of God, and obedience to God's spirit working within us. Now, there are three steps in this line, and the first of them is to recognize the problem that the heart is marred by sin. That's why you can't trust your conscience, that's why you can't trust your good judgment, that's why you can't trust your intuitive feelings, that's why you can't even trust your wife's intuitive feelings. The thing that you have to recognize is that the heart is marred by sin. Look at a couple Bible passages with me. It'll give you something to do, it'll strengthen your fingers, and, you know, you'll feel like you've been somewhere. Now, the first of them is in, is in Jeremiah seventeen. You may know it by heart, it seems to me it used to show up in the old navigator's verse memory, but in Jeremiah seventeen at verse nine, Jeremiah 17 at verse 9. And the nature of the passage tells us a powerful thing about the heart that has to be faced realistically. Jeremiah seventeen verse nine. The seventeenth chapter of Jeremiah finds the prophet Jeremiah pleading with the children of Israel to honor God and let God honor them. And in the midst of that, in verse nine, he says, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can fully understand it? Now the Lord says, I can. I search it, I try the reins, I know these things, but the nature of the heart is that it's deceitful above all things and desperately. We don't like to think of it that way, but I remember being at this conference years ago. I can't, not, not forty one years ago, but many years ago, and T. K. Duncan was there with one of his grandchildren, a little fella whose mother and father, I, you know, I can't keep these people straight over the years, but he was standing there holding this little baby, uh, you know, kind of in one hand, holding this baby, and my wife said, isn't he a sweet little baby, or something like that? And Mr. Duncan said, yes, he is, but he says, remember, at heart he's a wicked sinner like the rest of us, just, just waiting to grow up, he said, a wicked sinner like the rest of us. And sometimes we overlook those pictures in the course of life. We forget that the heart is deceitful, particularly your heart. You know that mine is, but you forget that yours is, and so you easily make judgments and come to conclusions and form opinions and say things that are absolutely wrong because you allow the inner emotional part to run away with yourself. You just have to know that it's marred by sin. Now, I am a new creation in Christ Jesus. I'm born again. I have a new stand with God, Second Corinthians five, for which we praise the Lord too. But I'd like to tell you that while I've been delivered from sin, I haven't been removed out of the presence of sin. It's all about and easily becomes inculcated within various aspects of us, and that's one of the great challenges of life, to live in holiness, not to live sinfully. A believer ought to make that a real point of it. And the concept is that I recognize that while I've been regenerated, within me is still that power of choice to do wrong, and it's very, very native there. And if you say to yourself, well, I'm not going to make any more mistakes, I'm a believer now, now that's your first mistake right there. Somehow we've got to learn to live in dependence on God, but that dependence is when we recognize that the heart is what it really is. I read an ad in a sporting goods store the other day for a new type of life jacket. A new type of life, just stood there reading the ad, new type of life jacket, you wear it on your wrist. When you fall in the water, you pull it, it fluffs up, and you fly away or something like that. But ironically, just a few hours later, I read a report on it in Consumer's Guide. Just the same day, a couple hours later, just by accident, and in Consumer's Guide, and the fellow in Consumer's Guide says, this thing says will not support you or save your life. So if you're a very small child, it will help you bubble three inches above the water, but if you're an adult man, you'll have to get down the bottom and jump up and come gasping. Your top won't save your life at all. So I wasn't going to buy one anyway, but that settled it right then and there. In life, we tend to depend on things that don't work because we don't know what their weaknesses are, but that's the way it is with the heart. Now look at a passage in Matthew two, a couple passages in Matthew, Matthew twelve and in Matthew fifteen. Matthew twelve and in Matthew fifteen, a couple passages in which the Lord Jesus picks up on this subject in a powerful sort of way. The emphasis I'm making is you have to recognize the problem that the heart is marred by sin. In Matthew twelve and verse thirty four, the Lord is rebuking a particularly wicked bunch. And you might say that doesn't really apply to us, and hopefully it doesn't, but he still gives a characterization that's necessary to know. He says in Matthew twelve thirty four, then generation of vipers, how can ye being evil speak good things, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh? And then what he's going to emphasize is that they're evil, and evil things will flow out of them. We're born again, so we can't really be described as being evil in that sense, but the passage in Matthew fifteen touches us exactly. In Matthew 15 and verse 19. They're talking about the things of the blind leaders leading the blind, and the Lord says, in verse eighteen, the things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart, and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies, and those are the things that defile a man. Eating with unwashed hands doesn't hurt you, says the Lord Jesus, but the things that come out of your heart do hurt you, and out of your heart come these things. Do those things come out of hearts of believers? We have to read James four to see that, and you discover that a lot of them are found within us. The endings, endings. Every time somebody drives by me on the highway with a big boat pulling out on a trailer, a small envy runs through me, just a small one. I get over it pretty quickly, but a lot of things go like that. Evil thoughts come to us easily. Uh, again, I, again, I don't want to give you all of my problems, see, but the business meetings that Brother Glock referred to this morning and the things that relate to those things. I, you know, every now and then there'll be a brother at a business meeting, he's always got the same, every now and then you just wish he had disappeared. Couldn't we have a partial rapture? Couldn't we? Couldn't we have a partial rapture? Couldn't we call his family and say he collapsed, you know? I forgive me, I may I never think that again, but those things cross my mind from time to time. Cross my mind, that's an evil thought. Crosses the mind from time to time. There's a sister that I know pretty well, I shan't give her name, but she always has some, some problem that she would like to share with me, and a lot of them relate to me, but, you know, you know, just once in a while when she said, can I speak to you, just once in a while I've said to myself, where's the fire from heaven? Just once in a while I've said that to myself. And you'll remember the Lord's disciples fell into that too. They said to the Lord, they said, let's call down fire and destroy the cities. No, the Lord said, I didn't come to condemn, but to save. You don't know what kind of people you are, but we don't know that either because we missed the hard problem. And so it becomes very easy to make a judgment on somebody, forgetting that our inner man is marked by sin, marred by sin, marred by sin. And as soon as I get into the judgmental business, then, then I'm in great difficulty. We used to chuckle at our children a little bit, some of whom you know and some of whom you don't know, and you're probably good on both counts. But whatever the circumstance happens to me, my daughter could see somebody walking across the street and say, there's a hypocrite. Didn't know him, never saw him, never heard him, bet he's a crook. Bet she's a bag lady, you know, just working up and down the street, and I, I, no matter what I would say, didn't seem to solve that particular problem. I'd say, how do you know that? I just know it. I just know it. And a lot of times in our circles, we get that way. We get suspicious of people, and we get worried about things, and we get judgmental, and we've forgotten that the heart is marred by sin. So we're new creations. The sanctification is a growth process, and we just have to bear that in mind. So before I begin settling all the affairs of the world and scoring up all the issues, I need to remember that the authority for those things is the word of God and the work of the Spirit, and not the judgments that flow out of my heart. Now, I'm not saying we're helpless with the heart, because I'm about to go to point two. but point one is important. I've got to see the problem, and the problem is that the heart is marred by sin. So when the apostle, I'm sorry, when the writer of Proverbs, Solomon, I think, says, keep your heart with all diligence, what he's saying is, you guard it carefully because it's marred with sin, and sin has a great attractive power to other sins, and if you don't guard it carefully, it may get away with you. Very easily, it may get away with you. Well, you say it isn't the heart that's wrong, it's his eyes. Nothing wrong with David's heart, he just looked over and saw Bathsheba. No, says the Lord Jesus, the wickedness proceeds out of the heart, and the other members of the body pick it up and carry it on from there. So that inner part of you, guard it, guard it. Secondly, hear the instruction of the Lord about it. Firstly, recognize the problem, it's marred by sin. Secondly, hear the instruction of the Lord. Hear the instruction of the Lord. And the instruction of the Lord in one word is this: let the heart be set on him. Let the heart be set on him. We read in Romans ten ten that with the mouth confession is made to salvation, with the heart man believes unto righteousness. And that's the concept that the inner man responds and recognizes that Jesus Christ is the Savior, died for our sins, and will give us eternal life. So with the heart, we set it upon the Son of God, and we say, Lord Jesus, I believe in you. I try to be less critical about non-meaningful things as life goes on. I'm not that old, but I've tried to be because criticism is close to the heart of a lot of us. I used to be critical of all the hymns, almost any hymn you'd mentioned, I could think of something that was wrong with the theological wording of it. There were only about two in the whole song book that I thought were right, and I wrote one of those myself. But, you know, it was very, very critical along those lines. Now, I think there's need for criticism and critical judgment, but we have to be careful on that. So I used to be critical. People would say, give your heart to the Lord. And I heard Mr. McGinley from Brooklyn say, what would the Lord want with a dirty old thing like your heart? And that so impressed me that I began saying it myself, like I had invented it. And then I, then I realized that isn't what I want to say, because when we talk about giving your heart to the Lord, we're not talking about a little thing, we're talking about believing on him in your heart, letting him have it, in the concept of Romans six six, taking over and putting to death what is wrong and giving life. So I'm, I'm trying to get wiser in being less critical about things that don't make a whole lot of difference. And it's been a long time since I bashed Peace Be Still or any number of other hymns that I can tell you a lot of theological mistakes with them right down the line. I just sing them lustily now and enjoy them, and if they get too much for me, I sing something, you know, like The Yellow Rose of Texas in the background or something like that, that we can all be irritated by. But the concept is that the writer says, with the mouth confession is made, with the heart belief is there. And at the time that one is born again, the heart is set on the Lord Jesus. I don't think, you know, here, I don't, I don't think you can be born again by saying, well, I believe in Jesus, but I want to believe in this too. I don't think that can happen. I think there's a moment where you recognize you're lost and you say, Lord Jesus Christ, I believe on you, and with the heart man believes under righteousness. That's setting the heart. The great command of Deuteronomy six is that you'll love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, everything you've got. The Hebrew is powerful there. The muchness of whatever you have, you'll love the Lord with that. Deuteronomy six. after verse four, five, and six pick up that thrust, the great command, and the Lord ratifies that in the New Testament. This is the great commandment that you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your soul. So you want to go back to Proverbs and look at the classic verse. It'll turn you back into the Old Testament, and that will give you reverse action, which helps strengthen the muscles on the other side of the fingers. But in Proverbs three is the classic verse on the heart, in Proverbs three, You may know it by heart, if not, you ought to pick it up. Proverbs 3 at verse 5. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. But trust in the Lord, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Set the wholeness of your thing in the Lord. Recognize in his word how good he is and the perfection of what he does, and learn to depend on him completely with all of your heart. That's a little hard to illustrate because so many things in life we don't really trust in a real full and committed way like that. So I've often told people, when I was with the tree surgery company and learning to climb using the climbing ropes a good many years ago, today they have buckets they put you in and float you up there and all that kind of stuff and electrocute about ten guys a year doing it, but they do that today. It's a different process. The, that profession has changed since my day in the forties. but we learned to climb with ropes, of which I was scared to death because I wasn't very brave, et cetera, et cetera. And when you're hanging from a rope sixty feet in the air, it looked about as thick as kitchen string. Actually, it was half inch nylon hemp that would hold twelve hundred pounds of live weight, but it looked like kitchen string to me, and I was scared to death. But after you go up and down on it lots of times, after they drop you and bounce you, after you swing on it, after a while, and there's no doubt. And after a couple of years of that, I became the company's, this will impress you, I became the hazard base climber. I got a nickel more an hour for risk climbing. I got really good with that rope, and all we had to do was be working in Pittsburgh, preferably across the street from an office building in which there were lots of secretaries. That's all we had to do. All I had to do was look out the window, and I could swing across the trolley lines on my roof going, ah. Yeah, see. You trust them with all your heart. You trust them with all your heart. After a while, it never occurs to you that the thing will break. I never saw one break in twelve years of active duty. Never saw one break. You trust them with everything you've got, all your heart. You just get in it, and you just, away you go. And I, that's, that's the way it becomes. I'd hate to have to go back to work like that today. I prefer this present, easy talking type work, but I just remember the joy of that. And the trusting in the Lord with all your heart is the recognition that he who has saved you provides for you, and you're willing to lay everything on him, even the way you play games, even the way you conduct your life, even the way you worship. You're willing to lay it all on him. You're willing to put it all in the hands you trust him with all your heart. I like the expression in Psalm one hundred and eleven verse one. Look at that. Psalm 111, verse 1. This is the wording in the King James Bible, but here the writer says, Psalm one hundred and eleven verse one. Praise you, the Lord. I will praise the Lord with my whole heart in the assembly of the upright and in the congregation. I will praise the Lord with my whole heart. Now, now, some of us are blessed in different ways, and I've been blessed most of my life with a strong voice. Not necessarily a good one, but a strong one, and I thank God for it many times. And I love to sing, and I love to sing with enthusiasm because that's the only way the Welsh sing, with enthusiasm, and my background is Welsh by way of the United States and the coal mines of Pennsylvania. But anyhow, like to sing that sort of way. So here it's easy to be a critic. Some people can't sing. I mean, they can't put two notes together. Uh, and some people who can sing, their voices are feeble. So don't be judged by this, but you sit many times in a worship service, and again, we can't be big critics all the time, but you'll realize that a lot of people don't worship with all their hearts. It isn't just because they're not loud, it's just because they're not there. If they were to suddenly disappear, you would never miss them until you took the offering, but you'd never miss them until that time came. And the problem is that their hearts are really not there. We've got so much to rejoice in and so much good before us in God that it really is kind of a capital crime not to praise the Lord with our whole heart. And I don't think it necessarily involves waving your hands, although if that helps, I wouldn't object too much, as long as they weren't, you know, in my face all the time. And I don't, but, but I think there's a wholeness in which we praise God, and we look forward to the participation in the meetings that our brother spoke of this morning with those lines. I will praise him with my whole heart. I will really pour it on with my whole heart. Uh, the last dramatic production I was in, a long time ago was Judas Maccabeus. Judas Maccabeus, and of course I, I had the role in that of Antiochus Epiphanes, the enemy of the Jews. It's quite an elaborate production with music and other sorts of stuff, and it's been a long time ago, but I was in it, and I had the role of Judas, I'm sorry, the role of Antiochus Epiphanes, the enemy of the Jews. What a death scene there is in that thing, but anyhow, I w- I had that role. And I just, you know, I always like a- I threw myself into it. I threw myself into it with so much vigor that the head of the institution putting it on, when the program was over, got up on the platform, and he said, I'd just like to tell you, in spite of Mr. Taylor's vigorous performance tonight, he does not hate the Jews. And that's right, I don't. I love the Jews. But in the play, Antiochus is the great enemy of the Jews, and he breathes out, that that's what I mean with all your heart. I don't think we have to be making noise all the time. Please don't misunderstand me on that. But the concept of the heart is that the heart is fixed upon God, and it's not worried about whether the oven is going to come on so you can feed the preacher. I just had that experience just the other day, not long ago, went to somebody's house, are you with me, Ruth, and the oven wasn't on. But that's a happy family, never fazed her a bit, never fazed her a bit. That, praise the Lord, didn't faze her a bit, see. And anybody can turn it on and let it cook for a couple of hours, and whatever's in it will come out just as well as it's been on before. And I didn't suffer a lick from it, a calorie, or anything else. But to worship God with all the heart. I also like the expression in Psalm one hundred and eight verse one. You can see it quickly too, where the writer says, oh God. It's nice when these things were in the first verse. Oh God, he says, my heart is fixed. That doesn't mean it's repaired. That means it's established. It's set. It's solidified. God, my heart is set on you, like the child waiting for his birthday or Christmas. Lord, what I think about is you. So that's the big thrust, folks. Hear the instruction, and the instruction is to have the heart set upon God. If I want to keep it, that's a big thing, to have the heart set upon God, because you see the tendency is to set it upon myself, and there's sin in all capacities along that line, and the heart already being marred by sin becomes worse by it. But to have it set upon God through faith in Jesus, to be sure, and through the worship of everyday life and living, but to see that the Lord is more important to me than anybody else or anything else, and have my heart set upon him and the things that work for him. In the third place, in the third place, what we do now is to take the appropriate action. First, we recognize the problem, the heart is marred by sin. Secondly, we hear the instruction to set it upon God, and on God fully and alone. And thirdly, we take the right action, and there are two lines of that action. First of all, to guard what you put into it, to guard the input of it. Now, the Lord Jesus tells us in Matthew fifteen, we were there a minute ago, he says, it isn't the things that you take into yourself that defile you, it's the things that come from without, I'm sorry, the things that come from the heart that really defile and hurt the man. But my point here is not that we can change the total input, but that if we feed the heart, the worldly diet is so prominent around about us, it naturally increases within it the vulgar things that come out of it. And that logic shouldn't need gone over again, I don't think. The heart there is like the mind, that we guard the input of it. I always note Ecclesiastes eleven nine and ten. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes eleven verses nine and ten, in that connection. Nine and ten. In verse nine, you let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, you put into your heart the things that give you satisfaction and peace before God, in verse nine. m And in verse ten, you take away from your heart anger. King James says sorrow. Anger, regret, sorrow, irritation, you take and put those things away from your heart. So you give the heart a diet that is good for it. I'm not going to comment on diets for the body, but I'll tell you a diet for the heart is giving to it the very truths of God and the grace of God and denying it, denying it, anger and irritation and greed and those things that make life so tough. Those things are luxuries which no God-fearing Christian ought to indulge in. Now, there's a righteous anger, and I'm not going to negate that from Ephesians four. There's a righteous anger. Most of the believers I know would not know righteous anger if they met it on the street that was wearing a sign. Most of the ones I know know unrighteous anger, where they just get mad about all sorts of things, and sometimes they will justify that, and the Lord knows the heart better than I do, so understand that I'm preaching generally and can't touch on every specific case. But the concept is that you guard the input of the heart, that you don't feed it a diet of anger. Easy to do. I'm not the sort of person who gets angry, hardly ever. Real anger with me is rare in an external sense, but I sometimes get tied up inside. And a couple years ago, I saw that the dean of the seminary where I have taught with such dedication for so long, I saw that he had assigned a course that I had taught for thirty years to somebody else. Thirty years, David, I taught that course. I've read hundreds of books, dozens of syllabi, prepared pages of notes to help it at that, you know, honestly, and suddenly he's assigned it to somebody else. Even moved me out of the department that I taught it in. Ah, I was greatly irritated. But I didn't go in and storm and shout at him because that, you know, that doesn't help. I went by and I said, well, Fred, I see you've assigned this course to so and so. He said, I thought we needed a change in those particular things. He said, nothing wrong with the way you're handling it, but you know, etcetera. So I said, oh yeah. Went down to my office and smoke poured out of my ears. If you're going to get mad, hurt yourself, don't hurt a lot of others, but try not to do that either. And of course it wasn't really smoke, it was fire and brimstone just poured out of my ears. And the longer I said that to my heart, the uglier I felt. But when I came to the point where I could say, well, these men have the authority, I'm supposed to respond respectfully to these men, I'm supposed to yield myself to God. I took about five doses of that, seven or eight doses of humility pills, six or seven applications of the fact that somebody else could probably do it better, that I was stale on the subject anyway. Flattered myself that they wanted me to teach a difficult subject that no one has ever done well. And by the time I did that, my heart began to feel good too. I went up to the office of the man who's going to teach the course, who looked about as bad as I did, and I said to him, I said, I've got lots of helps for this course. He said, I'll take anything you've got, brother, anything you've got. So I just laid a box of stuff on him and went back to my den, feeling good about the whole thing. Of course, I don't think he's taught it right, but anyhow, feels good about the whole thing. So you guard the input, you guard the input, you watch the input, and you can see that in a lot of places in the scripture, but you watch the input. And secondly, you try to police the expression. You watch the input, and you try to police the expression. I can't say much about that tonight, but if you look in Proverbs twenty three— I'll start in Proverbs sixteen. that's easier, and it's first too. In Proverbs sixteen verses nine and twenty three. police the expression. Sixteen nine. Proverbs sixteen nine. note this humbling, humbling fact. A man's heart devises his way, but the Lord directs his steps. So make sure that the way in which you walk are in accord with the direction of the Lord, not just the way you feel inside. I can't elaborate on that, but that's a big thing. That's policing the action of the heart. Make sure that your walk is in accord with the word of the Lord, not just the way you feel inside. And in verse twenty three of the same chapter, the heart of the wise teaches his mouth and adds learning to his lips. You'll find a number of verses in Proverbs twenty three and in Proverbs fifteen twenty eight. I shan't read those. I'll simply say that you learn to police the expressions of the heart. My father used to say that he liked a man who, who said what he thought, but he said, I wish he would think when he said it. Now, he probably got that from somebody else, but anyhow, he's the guy that said it to me when I was a little boy. He says, say what you think. I like a man who says what he thinks, but I want him to be thinking when he says it. And that's the concept of policing the heart. Before you make the big judgments, before you make the big denunciations, before you bring out whatever happens to come, think it through first of all, and see if it's the sort of thing that really pleases God and blesses God. Because out of the heart come the issues of life, and if you don't guard it, you may wind up on the scrap pile somewhere. I think none of us are immune to the problem, and I meet people in all sorts of places and all sorts of conditions who are outside the fellowship of God's people and outside the love of God's people in a practical way. Certainly we hope they pray for them, but a practical way, and when you get right down to it, it's just that they didn't watch their heart. They got greedy and irritated. Somebody criticized them because the way they passed out the song books, and they never came back. Somebody said something nasty to them one day because their socks didn't match their necktie, and they never came back. And somebody didn't thank them three times for some dumb little job that they did or some big thing, and they never came back. And the only thing you can say is, is that they weren't guarding the heart. Because if the heart is guarded, the spirit in us masters all of those things. Well, I'm not really feeling grouchy or angry or irritated about that, but I'll tell you, what we need desperately are people who have a commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ that overcomes the physical and fleshly disappointments that so easily get the better of us. That's what we need. And so you want to see, first of all, that your whole life is set apart for God, and secondly, that day by day, with the help of his word and the instruction of his spirit, that you guard your heart. If you don't, it will get away from you almost before you know it. Let's pray to that end this evening. Gracious Father, we thank you for the peace and blessing that come with knowing the Lord Jesus. That we've been forgiven, we just praise your name. That we've been given the privilege of testimony and worship and remembrance and joy in the Holy Ghost, we thank you. Oh God, in the light of all of these things, help us to love you with all of our hearts and souls, with all of our being, and to absolutely adore the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for this lovely day and your blessings in it. Help me, Lord, to guard my heart, because out of it come the issues of life. We give you thanks in Jesus' name. Amen.