Obey from the Heart

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

1. 0:00:11

   Lord, you have mine, and I will search for you. Jesus, take my life and lead. Lord, you have mine, and I will search for you. Let me be to you, a sacrificial. Praise your name, Lord. We sing these songs, Lord, that you have our heart. Lord, that question is, do you really? And Lord, help us always to examine our hearts that we may know where we really stand so that if we need to correct anything, we can correct it.

2. 0:03:15

   Because Lord, we don't wanna go through this life and think we have you or have a version of Christianity and end up finding out that it was wrong all along. Or the devil is into deceiving people and he has deceived multitudes upon multitudes, Lord. And we don't wanna be deceived. So Lord, lead us and guide us into all truth, I pray. Help us learn what it means to obey from the heart. We thank you for that, Lord, and it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen, amen. You may be seated this morning. We'll welcome everyone. Fire and Grace Church, those watching and listening out there all over the place. Now, my wife does the music. She has no idea whatsoever what I'm gonna be talking to you about today, but that last song probably couldn't have been more perfect. Lord, you have my heart, really, really. So we sang these songs, but is it reality in our lives? Good songs now, good worship songs, but does the Lord really, really have our hearts? We're gonna find out this morning. Is that all right? This is kind of a continuation of last week. Not that I planned it really that way, but it's kinda how it's working out. And last week, if you've forgotten, and if you didn't hear last week, you'd need to. It's probably one of the most important messages for believers to understand is the motives of our heart. And last week, I talked to you about the motives of your heart toward sin. How that you should hate sin and love righteousness. And not that a Christian will never sin, but it should be the exception in your life and never the rule. As it says in Romans 6, Paul said, sin shall not have dominion over you if you're not under the law, but under grace. Meaning, grace doesn't mean God just overlooks what you do. Grace means God will give you the power and the help that you need to overcome habitual sin in your life. But there's really two things. There's sin, and we could say, well, anything that's not of God is sin, but there's really two kinds that I wanna talk about. Last week, I talked about primarily the sins of the lust of the flesh, the things that the flesh desires to do. As we talked about, Paul spoke about that in Romans 7. David in Psalm 19, how even as believers, God said of David, he's a man after my own heart. We know Paul said the Lord made me an example that you should follow. But they both admitted that they still had struggles with sin. But there is a difference. Everybody likes to point out David's sin of adultery. Yes, he committed adultery, but David did not live as an adulterer.

3. 0:06:17

   He did not live in that lifestyle habitually. He truly repented of that sin. And so last week, that's mainly what I was focusing on, the struggle we have, even as born-again Christians, that we're still gonna struggle with the flesh nature, with temptation, with sin, and we may mess up, but we don't lay there. We don't wallow in it. We don't embrace it. We don't make it become a lifestyle. But there's another aspect where God wants us to, it can be, I guess some have called it sins of omission. I'm gonna call it where we don't obey God. And you're gonna hear some verses this morning that I've covered in the past, and maybe some that you haven't heard before. But this thing of obeying God from the heart, this is a New Testament phrase. And obedience, I'm just gonna put it to you this way. If I had a chalkboard up here, or a whiteboard, I would write these words. Faith, and I've said this many times, faith equals obedience. Unbelief equals disobedience. And here's the two things that as Christians, two aspects of God, we are supposed to obey. We are supposed to obey the written word under, now under the New Testament context. We're to obey the written word of God, and we're to obey the leading of the Holy Spirit. Now if we don't do those things, we can talk a big game, all we want to. We can talk all spiritual. We can act all, you know, pious and devout, and everyone around us can think that we're holy. But if you're not obeying the Lord from the heart, then number one, I'm just gonna say this, you can talk that game all you want to, but you really don't love God. It's real simple. Jesus said, if you love me, obey me. It's John 14, matter of fact, go ahead and put that verse up. He said, if you love me, obey me. I mean, it's real simple. He asked in another place in Luke, he said, why do you call me Lord, Lord? And you do not the things that I say. The whole thing about Jesus calling the disciples and even those afterwards, the entire thing was, will you deny yourself and take up your cross and follow the Lord? Will you obey the Lord with your life? That's it. And what I'm gonna talk about today is not just obedience, but obeying the Lord when he tells you to do very difficult things. Even things sometimes that will appear to those

4. 0:09:17

   that don't understand what's going on, they will appear crazy or will appear mean or will appear that they don't make sense. I think about Genesis 21 where, Hagar, Abraham basically gets ahead of God and he goes in and takes Hagar kind of as a surrogate and has a child because him and Sarah can't have a child, but God had promised that Abraham and Sarah would have a child and so by the Egyptian Hagar, he has Ishmael and then as Ishmael gets older and Isaac is born and there begins to be a conflict there and it says, cast out the bond woman. Now think about this and Abraham was very grieved about this because he loved Ishmael, but the strife and the problems it was causing in the household, he finally had to, he had to cast her out into the desert and then the Lord comes and says, don't be afraid, do this, this is what you're to do. So the Holy Spirit, the Lord directed him to basically give Hagar some water and say go. Now anybody like in the church world and we go, that is just mean and nasty. What kind of pastor is Abraham? Take and give this woman with a child a little bit of water and send them out there, but the Lord sent that. The Lord told him to do that and that was a hard thing and that's chapter 21 of Genesis. Then you get chapter 22 and the Lord tells him to take his son to Mount Moriah to offer him as an offering, to test him it said. And what was the test? To see whether Abraham loved the Lord more than he loved his son. He's like, oh well God, God won't test us. Oh yes he will. He doesn't tempt us with evil, but he will test our hearts. A lot of people say well, the Lord told Abraham to go kill his son. That's not what it says. Said go offer him. Never said go kill it. But it was a test. And Abraham passed the test because he proved that he didn't love anything more than he loved the Lord. Now Abraham was interesting when you start looking at Abraham and we're gonna look at some scriptures about him this morning. But when you look at him you gotta remember the Bible says that we who are of faith, who walk in faith, who have this new covenant, new testament faith in Jesus and this born again experience that we are the children of Abraham as well. And then Jesus said in John eight he said Abraham saw my day and was glad. And when did that happen? Well we have the story of Melchizedek who was king of Salem, king of peace, king of righteousness. And this Melchizedek appeared to him, said who was without father and mother without beginning of days or end of life.

The complete timestamped transcript is published as a crawlable reading page so every sermon topic remains searchable without making this video page unnecessarily heavy.