Heart Test

Well, the Jesus way is our current sermon series. Hello and good morning. Good morning balcony. Thank you. Good morning everybody, my name is Mark I'm one of the pastors and we are so glad you're with us. Thank you for joining us not only here, but on the live stream. Happy Father's Day! Happy Father's Day, I should say to all of our dads this one more time. Give it up for them. Yay, it's a good day. Good day to be a dad.

And I just have to say seeing the cruise get step just warms my heart because you're looking at future not just future already ministry leaders but so many pastors and ministry leaders end up getting their starts in those types of programs, camp programs and the like. It's just so exciting to see God raising up people in our churches. Isn't that cool? I'm just grateful that God just keeps kind of back-filling those of us who aren't getting any younger, right? That's very cool.

Let me start with a story. Years ago when my sister Jennifer was in her graduate program studying to become a cardio rehab specialist, I went to go visit her at her school, Ohio State, excuse me, the Ohio State University. You gotta be careful, there are Michigan people in here. I get the little reaction every time when I say that. Hey, I got no skin in the game. It's just where she went to school. Anyway, she brought me down to their big lab exercise room and she said, "Hey, how about I give you a stress test?" She was practicing this and I was her guinea pig, so I said sure, why not?

She put all these little probes on my torso, kind of like an EKG setup, and then put a mask on my face connected to a hose, presumably to measure oxygen in my breath or lung capacity. I don't know, I just did what she told me to do. Then she said, "Now get up on this treadmill and your job is to keep up with it." If no one ever had a stress test before, you know what I'm talking about here. So, you know, first it's pretty easy. It's just kind of your stroll along and then it gets a little steeper and a little faster, a little steeper and faster until you die. At least it feels that way by the time you decide to quit, you know what I mean?

As we continue in the Sermon on the Mount, there are times when it feels kind of like a stress test. Like Jesus is probing, he's zeroing in on the conditions of our hearts. We just last weekend, Adrian was preaching and did a great job preaching about the heart issues connected to murder, adultery, and divorce. Yeah, poor guy hadn't preached since Thanksgiving and he gets to preach on murder, adultery, and divorce. He's taking the weekend off this week.

We are picking up where he left off because in this section in Matthew 5, kind of the latter half, Jesus brings up these six scenarios, their illustrations or case studies, whatever you want to call them. They have a way of kind of getting to the heart of what might be the principle that it leads with, and we're going to see that today. Adrian did the first three; we're going to do the second three this morning as Jesus uses all of these things for what you might call a heart test.

But before we get into today's scripture, I want to share with you just one line from a prayer by David. Have you ever heard the expression? There's no such thing as little prayers. This is a case in point because in Psalm 26:2, David prays this: "Test me, Lord, and try me; examine my heart and my mind." Now, I don't know about you, but if I'm being honest, that's kind of a scary prayer. You know, a lot of times I don't want to know what's going on in my heart. And yet Jesus loves us. He loves us so much. He just takes us exactly as we are and he loves us too much to just leave us that way, right?

So prepare for a little heart test this morning because again, God just loves us beyond our imagination. He wants us to flourish, and so whatever he's doing in our hearts and lives, he's doing for our good, our blessing. Do you believe that? Okay, well, here we go. Because along these lines, we're going to see three things today. And the first one is what I'm calling the truthfulness test, and the underlying question goes like this: What's my motive? What's my motive? Specifically when it comes to my words.

Because would you agree we often use our words to influence others around us? And I want you to see how Jesus gets to the heart of this. Matthew 5, picking up at verse 33, he says, "Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.'" He's summarizing teachings in the law of Moses, the first five books of the Old Testament, laws and teachings about making an oath to either God or a fellow human being.

But over the course of time, people became uncomfortable with invoking God's name, and so they started to swear oaths by things like heaven or earth or Jerusalem or the temple and so on. The underlying motive was this: if I break my promise to you, well, it's not as bad if I swore by Jerusalem than if I said I swear to God. See what I mean? It seems like a lesser offense, and it got to the point of just being totally ridiculous in the day of Jesus.

In fact, when Jesus calls out the Pharisees and the teachers of the law in Matthew 23, look what he says. He says, "Woe to you, blind guides! You say if anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing, but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath. You blind fools! Which is greater, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say if anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing, but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath. You blind men! Which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred?" Again, he's exposing the motive for loopholes. How do I get out of my promise?

Now back to Matthew 5. But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is God's throne, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. How many of you know that to be true in your life? All you need to say is simply yes or no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

Now, is Jesus saying you should never make a promise about anything? I mean, I'm going to be leading officiating my niece's wedding in a couple weeks. Is Jesus saying they shouldn't take their vows? No, not at all. This is about being truthful, trustworthy, and the last line of what he says really kind of gives us the interpretive key when he mentions the evil one. Anything more than this comes from the evil one. Jesus calls the devil in John's gospel the father of lies because that's what he does. He twists words. He even twists scripture in order to coerce and manipulate people.

Like with Adam and Eve, he says, "Did God really say you can't eat from any tree in this garden?" And the answer is no, God did not say that. Actually, God only said there was one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that is off-limits to you. The rest of them are all yours. Could be thousands of them; who knows? He just completely turns it on his head in order to manipulate. And he tried the same stunt with Jesus when Jesus was being tempted in the wilderness. Matthew 4 says to him, "If you're the son of God, throw yourself off the top of the temple, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up with their hands.'" To paraphrase Jesus' answer, it's, "Yeah, and God also says don't be an idiot." Okay, but again, he's trying to twist things for his own ends.

And so Jesus says there's a link there when we give oaths for the same motivation when we try to manipulate or make a promise in order to coerce people into doing what we want. Along these lines, Dallas Willard says this in his book, *The Divine Conspiracy*. This is really good. He says, "Jesus goes right to the heart of why people swear oaths. He knew that they do it to impress others with their sincerity and reliability and thus gain acceptance of what they're saying and what they want. It is a method for getting their way." Remember when you maybe were a kid on the playground? "Hey, can I have a piece of gum? I promise I'll bring you a pack tomorrow." Really? "I swear to God." What you were just trying to get what you want in that moment.

And so when it comes to the truthfulness of our words, especially the ones we feel motivated to back up with some kind of promise, here's the heart check: Ask yourself this: Do I give assurances simply to get what I want? You follow me here? Do I have a tendency to lay it on thick? Do I sell people in order to advance my agenda? Now, it's likely on a day-to-day level, most of us don't back up everything we say with "I swear to God," but how easy is it to suddenly find yourself just exaggerating a little bit to impress people or telling a half-truth in order to get away with something? Or how about this one? How about lying just to get out of doing things you don't want to do? You're moving, "Oh God, I'm sorry, I'm going to be out of town that weekend. Sorry."

So when Jesus says, "You know, just say yes or no," he's calling us to have ultimately confidence in who we are as children of God. Watch this: Because our Father, he sees all of the things that we try to hide from others, all the things that we embellish about ourselves, and yet he still loves us more than we can even imagine. And when you live in the awareness of this, you end up caring far less about how you rate in the eyes of other people. You can just rest in the fact that you're a child of God. And so the temptation to manipulate outcomes weakens as we trust, "He's God, I'm not. I can relax. I don't have to control everyone's perception of me, control the narrative through how I get through the influence of my words."

This is what John is really getting at in his first letter when he says, "Perfect love casts out fear." Because in the hands of my loving Father, I really have nothing to prove, and ultimately I have nothing to lose, which is a key thing to hold on to when we look at this second challenge because we will all face it, and that's the suffering test. The suffering test, and of course the question here is never, you know, if we will experience suffering. It's simply when and how. The only thing that you or I can actually control is this: What's my response?

You know, it's one thing if maybe you get an illness that's typical to humankind or, you know, a tree falls on your house or something like that, and you know, those things may compel us to think, "You know, why did God allow this into my life?" And yet what really, really I think gets under our skin is when we suffer as a result of the actions of others, right? I mean, that can cut so deep. And this is where Jesus is going to zero in starting at verse 38. You have heard it said that it was said, "Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth." At first blush, when you think about that type of justice system, it sounds kind of brutal. You know, you poke out my eye, I get to poke out yours. And yet this principle, this law, which wasn't exclusive to the Old Testament scriptures or other ethical writings alongside this, they're kind of saying the same thing.

The intention was to limit what you could do to punish an offense. In other words, you poke out my eye doesn't mean I get to kill you. Okay? The punishment had to fit the crime, and the intention was to prevent just kind of endless blood feuds or endless cycles of violence between families or clans or neighbors. Now, in practice, the ancients rarely kind of did this literally, like, you know, you broke my leg, I'm going to break yours. What they did more often, and exclusively by the time of Jesus, is if you injured someone else in some way, you had to pay them money or turn over property as compensation. Often we do the same thing today.

But Jesus is going to raise the bar here. He's kind of going to insert the idea: What if people in his kingdom didn't always insist on getting even? What if it wasn't always kind of tit for tat, right? He says, "You've heard it said, 'Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth,' but I tell you, do not resist an evil person." Okay, whoa. Hold on. Jesus, wait, wait. Are you saying that I could never defend myself or my loved ones, that I'm just supposed to be a doormat in every occasion? Okay, that's not his point. What Jesus is saying here, and the original is a little bit technical here, but what he's saying is do not resist in kind; don't retaliate.

And how do we know this? Well, watch how he illustrates this. He continues, "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn then the other cheek also." His audience would have understood exactly what it's like. They could have seen it happen before because Roman culture, which dominated the Middle East at this time, was very, very stratified. They did not believe that all people were created equal, far from it. You had your place somewhere on the societal rung, and one way that you could insult someone you believed was inferior to you was to slap them with the back of your right hand right across your cheek.

Now, I want you to visualize this. In fact, when you just turn to your neighbor and—no, just kidding, don't do that. But if a hand was coming across in this direction, right hand, what side of your face is it going to connect with? The right, okay? Now, I just—you know, that person would just say, "I've just insulted you." But if you were to offer them the left side of your face, your left cheek, and they have to now come back with an open hand, right? Actually left. Guess what? In their culture, that's how you insulted an equal. So you're responding, you're actually affirming your dignity, your God-given dignity, but you are not retaliating in kind. Okay, you're not.

And so he's going to follow with three quick examples that are right along the same theme. He says, "If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." Again, all these scenarios have kind of a through line because someone is wanting something from you, and there's no assurance that you're going to get anything in return. Someone sues you for your shirt; that's kind of a joke to them because if you give them your shirt and then you give them your coat, that leaves you naked. That was pretty much all people wore was an inner shirt and a cloak. Like, well, that would be a terrible situation, right?

If someone forces you to go another mile, go to the Roman soldiers who could compel people to carry their pack an extra mile. You weren't going to get anything out of that. Even the person who wants to borrow from you, he's not saying, you know, "Yeah, give them your money even though they're going to spend it on drugs or things that they could never really afford." He's saying, "Don't be an enabler." But at the same time, don't become cynical about every single person who ever asked you for help. Like, man, everyone is just kind of sponging off me all the time. He's basically saying, you know, don't worry about getting even all the time.

Years ago, I was visiting a guy in prison. I was pretty early in my pastorate, and I had to go and check in with the chaplain at the prison so I could get in. Then I went and visited this person, and I spent most of the time listening. He spent most of the time talking, and basically pretty much everything he told me was why he did not deserve to be in prison, why he was innocent and set up and da da da. I remember kind of becoming somewhat, you know, cynical of what he was telling me. But I prayed for him at the end, and then as I left, I had to check in with the chaplain again. He said, "Well, how did your visit go?" I said, "Oh, it was all right. You know, I spent most of the time listening and I prayed, but I have to tell you, I think pretty much everything he told me was a lie." And this wise old chaplain responded like this: "Well, you know what, pastor? Maybe your job today wasn't to be able to discern what he was saying was truthful or not. Maybe your job was just to come listen and pray."

It was a great word to me because he's saying, look, don't let your suspicion about this person kind of taint your view of them. Don't return a wrong towards you with a wrong towards the other person. You know, in fact, here's the heart check: Ask yourself this: Am I allowing evil against me to produce evil inside me? That's what Jesus is getting at. Am I allowing the evil outside me to produce evil inside me, whether it's, you know, making me cynical or bitter, resentful, vengeful?

This is where one of his close followers, Peter, says some really helpful things. Remember Peter, the guy who cut off the ear of a servant when he was being arrested? That same Peter says this years later when he's older and he's wiser, and he says this to this: "You were called because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled insults at him, he did not retaliate. When he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly."

Now, does it take wisdom to live that kind of stuff out? You better believe it does. Jesus does not give us a script for every situation. And I want to make something clear. Please hear me. Because if you are in an abusive or some sort of unsafe situation, remove yourself. Remove yourself. This is about not retaliating, not allowing the evil against you to produce evil inside you.

Let me share another quote from Dallas Willard. In fact, I put this one at the bottom of your notes because I think it's so helpful. He says, "In every concrete situation, we have to ask ourselves not did I do the specific things in Jesus's illustrations, but am I being the kind of person Jesus's illustrations are illustrations of? Am I the kind of person that Jesus is trying to illustrate in these examples here?" You know, what does it look like? Well, I think it looks like, for instance, the kids in this photo right here. These are members of what was called the Children's Crusade, and on May 2nd, 1963, over a thousand of these kids, some as young as six and seven years old, they cut school in order to demonstrate segregation downtown Birmingham, Alabama.

Some, by the way, they came armed with handwritten signs, many of them quoting scripture and a commitment to non-violence. They marched into town singing songs, and they were met by fire hoses. They were met by police dogs. And believe it or not, over 600 of these children were hauled off in buses to jail. Many of them stayed several days in those jails. But the power of their peaceful call for justice reached all the way to the White House, triggering a response from President John F. Kennedy, and it created a tipping point for the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Wow, yeah, amen.

This question is just as relevant today as it was then: Can a man love God and hate his neighbor? And Jesus is going to address this last one as he sums up this entire section of his sermon with the final issue. It's the enemy test, the enemy test, and the question here is what's my identity? Who am I at the core? And the people in Jesus's audience, like many people today, saw themselves in different categories. They saw themselves, you know, there's us and there's them, and we tend to think sometimes, you know, they're church people, non-church people, spiritual people, secular people, you know, in with God people, maybe not so in with God people.

But I want you to see how Jesus just cuts right through this. He says, "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" Actually, the Bible doesn't prescribe hating your enemy. It got picked up kind of in traditions or thoughts, kind of like, you know, the saying, "God helps those who help themselves." Not in the Bible, but a lot of people think it is. David complains in some of the psalms about his enemies in Psalm 139, kind of goes on a rant about hating people who hate God, but that's descriptive of his feelings; it's not prescriptive, like this is what you should go do. But Jesus is just kind of calling it for what it is in his time.

And he says, "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be what? Children of your Father in heaven." That's the identity issue right there. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? So here's the thing: you may think you are closer to God than others are, but if you don't love them, you're no different. In fact, unless you love your enemies, even your enemies, Jesus says, you're not following in your Father's footsteps.

And if this hasn't set the bar high enough, he closes with this: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Show of hands, got any perfect people here this morning? Yeah, I didn't think so. I saw a hand over there, congratulations! For the rest of us, the word perfect in the original here doesn't mean perfect rule follower, okay? We don't have a good word for this, but the word in the Greek here for perfect is *telos*. Okay? The word in English here is *telos* because we don't have a good word for this. So we just took the word directly from the Greek, and it means the ultimate aim, the object, the end result of a process. If I were to throw a football across the auditorium to a particular person and it reached them, that would be the *telos* of that pass. It would be the pass would be complete, it would be mature, finished, if you will.

And so Jesus is saying the true test of spiritual and personal maturity is love. Love even for those people who you do not like, loving others the very way that you love yourself. And God does not limit who that is, including those who do not love you back. A while ago, I heard John Ortberg tell a story about Abraham Lincoln. You, I'm sure, know that before Lincoln became president, he practiced law. And he had some renown in his state of Illinois, and one day he gets the biggest case of his career because it's in Illinois. But then the court, it gets shifted or the case gets shifted to a court in Cincinnati, and so they don't need Lincoln anymore. But since they paid him, he felt obligated to kind of stick with it.

And so the new lead attorney on this case is a guy named Edwin Stanton. Stanton is a nationally renowned lawyer, but Stanton had nothing but contempt for Abraham Lincoln, so much so that he would not even let Lincoln sit with the other attorneys on the case. He had so much contempt for him that even though Abraham Lincoln had done all this research on the case, Stanton didn't want to even look at the research that Lincoln had done. One day, to try to break the ice, Lincoln says, "Hey, why don't I invite the whole legal team out to lunch? We can just have lunch together as a team." And Stanton's response was this: "I'm not going to have anything to do with that long-armed ape."

Now fast forward to President Lincoln and the onset of the Civil War. Lincoln is in need of a secretary of war, and everyone around him, everyone that knows something about this, says the very best guy for that job is Edwin Stanton. Lincoln wrote this about that decision to a friend: "It looks like I will have to swallow all my pride and a good deal of self-respect and ask Stanton to serve for the good of the country." Well, he did, and he was brilliant at his job. But that did not stop him from being offensive and arrogant. In fact, one time when he had a disagreement with Lincoln about something, he said to another staffer, "We have got to get that baboon out of the White House." And when this story reached Lincoln, he didn't even consider Stanton's comment an insult. In fact, he said, "That is not an insult; it's an expression of opinion. What troubles me most about it is that Stanton said it, and Stanton is usually right." I mean, talk about humility!

But over the course of time, Lincoln began to win Stanton over to the point where Stanton began regarding Lincoln with deep admiration and affection. He went on to say this: "Never were men—" and he's certainly talking about himself here—"Never were men more wrong about somebody than we were about Abraham Lincoln. He is the best of us." His loyalty to Lincoln became so legendary that when Lincoln was shot and dying in a little hotel room right next to the Ford Theater, Stanton was there by his side, sobbing loudly so people could hear from way outside the room. He's just sobbing, weeping, and when Lincoln died, it was Stanton who said the words, "Now he belongs to the ages." This man's legacy is going to go a long, long way.

Okay, words from the very same guy who once said, "I want nothing to do with that long-armed ape." And yet by his love, Lincoln had completely captured his friendship and his heart. So final heart check: Who is my Father calling me to love? Who's your Edwin Stanton? Who comes to mind? You know, so often this just plays out in very ordinary ways. Just this week, as I was writing this sermon, God laid it upon my heart: "Mark, don't be a hypocrite." Because there's someone that your attitude has soured towards. And I didn't hate this person, but I haven't been demonstrating a whole lot of love either. And so I simply prayed, "Lord, I'm sorry. Help me. Give me the love that I lack." And wouldn't you know it, the very next day I had a conversation with this person, and it was like the best conversation I've ever had.

And I don't tell you this because I'm patting myself on the back; far from it, I was being a jerk. But our Father is so gracious. I mean, is there a prayer that he's more eager to answer than "Lord, help me love someone else?" I think he delights in answering that prayer: "Father, give me love for that person." So who is your Father calling you to love? Let's go to him and ask him to soften our hearts.

Heavenly Father, thank you for your goodness and your grace. Thank you, Lord, that you just don't give up on us, Lord. You love us so much that you want to conform us to the image and likeness of your Son, Jesus. You want us to be fully human. And so, Lord, I know that in this room right now, within the sound of my voice on our live stream, there are people going, "It's too hard," or "If you only knew," because some of us bear wounds inflicted by others. We can't imagine how that could ever be healed, and maybe they won't be fully healed until we see you in your kingdom. But Lord, I pray that you would bring grace and mercy and healing and comfort and wisdom into the particularities of our lives, into the complexities of our relationships, and that you would so fill us with your love that it would overflow until all of the relationships and the encounters that we have. That's a big ask, Lord, but you're an even bigger God. And so we place our faith and our trust in you, and all God's people said, Amen.