#5: “God Gives Us a Pure Heart”
INTRO:
Thus far in this series I have talked about:
1. The need to guard your heart;
2. The fact that God and only God knows your heart;
3. The deceitfulness of your heart; and
4. How your heart must be presented to God, contrite and
broken.
This morning I want to talk about how God can give us a “new”
or “purified” heart.
In Psalm 51:10 the sinful David calls upon God to “Create in
me a clean heart…and renew a right spirit within me.”
Through the prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 36, verses 26 and 27,
God promised the people that the time would come when He would
“give (them) a new heart and put a new spirit (in them).” He
said, “…I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and
give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you
and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my
rules.”
Well, that time came when Jesus came to live a sinless life
among them and die on the cross for them. Jesus said, “I came that
they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “…if anyone is in Christ, he
is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new
has come.”
In Acts 15:5-11, where some of the converts to Christianity from
among the Pharisees were contending that Gentile converts “must be
circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses,” Peter said,
“God, who knows the heart, bore witness to them by giving
them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and He made no
distinction between us and them, having cleansed their hearts
by faith.” In other words, God gave them “new” or “purified” hearts.
2
In 1 Corinthians 2:16 Paul quotes Isaiah 40:13, “for who has
understood the mind (or heart) of the Lord that he may instruct
him?” and then says, “but we have the mind (or heart) of Christ.”
Some things are very clear:
1. God created us with pure, eternal hearts;
2. Sin, or disobedience, on the part of Adam and Eve destroyed the
purity and eternality of the human heart;
3. We cannot, with all our human effort and will-power, restore the
purity and eternality our hearts;
4. Only God can create in us a pure heart, a right spirit, and an
eternal life.
But why? How? And how do we know He has? I’d like to try to
answer these questions today