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The Long Journey from the Head to the Heart
Dr. Eric J. Gilchrest, Pastor
. . . are few. And so for this last season of Church Life, we've been talking about these two different paths, right? There's this one way to live a life in which you find yourself down roads of destruction that you should never have walked down. And then there are ways of living a life that lead to real life. And Jesus warns us, he says, the way to life is not easy, It's narrow. It's probably going to cause you some difficulty at times. This isn't to say it's the easy road at all. If anything, the other Rd. is the easy one. But it is a road that leads to life. And so I've been talking about different ways that this gets played out and different topics. This sermon is A little bit like if you've ever watched a television show where you're watching these characters unfold over a span of time, and then the storyteller goes back in time, right? And the storyteller starts to tell you about the roots of the character. I remember the first time I maybe encountered this completely was the show Lost. They tell you about the various characters, Jack and Kate and a guy named John Locke. And then you're like 3, four, five seasons into it. And then you're finding out about John Locke as a little kid or something and like what happened to his life. Or if you've read good books, maybe, I'm blanking on this, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, right? He does this well. He gives you not just like the world therein, but he builds the world out. This sermon's a little like that, where we've been focused on what Jesus offers these two ways in Matthew 7. But truth be told, Jesus is not making this up whole cloth. He's actually pointing to the passage that Dave just read for us back from Deuteronomy chapter 30. And it's worth knowing this because there's actually a whole history of this that's sitting in your Bible that predates anything that Jesus says or does. And it's worth knowing what's really happening in these scriptures. And so today my hope is to kind of walk you through a few of them to show you what Jesus is pulling on and then to show you that Jesus' intent is to actually fill all of that out and to make a way where before there had not been a way. Let's begin with prayer. God our Heavenly Father, we thank you. for sending your Son Jesus Christ to die on a cross for our sins, to cleanse us from our iniquity, that we might have new life. We thank you for raising him from the dead, that he might defeat death once and for all, and offer true life, eternal life for all of us. And Lord, we thank you for sending your Holy Spirit. And we ask right now, here and now, that you send your spirit into this place, that Lord, you speak through my words to the hearts of those listening, that they might know what you are trying to tell them this morning. We pray this in Christ's holy name, amen. So if I were to ask you what is Jesus' famous sermon, you would probably say, the Sermon on the Mount. Is there another one? It's kind of the only one that I am aware of that maybe gets a title, like the sermon something or other, right? If you were to go home today and want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you would go to Matthew chapter 5 through 7. It's long. It's 3 whole chapters long, right? And in Matthew 5 through 7, If I were to ask a follow-up question, like what's the text Jesus is preaching his sermon from, what would you say to that? No, nothing? Okay. Yeah, that's fine. Because here's the truth, right? I would say it this way. He's preaching from the whole of the law. And he's teaching us how to read the whole of the law, which is to say the first five books of the Bible, Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy. This is where you find the Torah. Another word for law, by the way, frankly, a translation I would prefer is instruction. These are instructions on how to live a life. both communally, for Israel as a whole, like how Israel as a whole is supposed to live a life, and then for the Israelite himself or herself, or for you, yourself, like how you're to live a life. These are the instructions. And so Jesus is kind of flipping through the instruction manual, and he's then preaching through this sermon of chapter 5 and then 6 and then 7, and he gets to the end of seven, and then he delivers the line that I just read earlier about the two different ways. perhaps not surprisingly, he's doing precisely what Moses did. You see, Moses delivers the law, and he gives us things, the memorable ones like the Ten Commandments, right? And then he gives all these other little laws, and if this happens, well then do that, and if this happens, well then do that, and you shouldn't do this over here, and you should definitely do this over here, and then he gets to the end of it all. In Deuteronomy 30, is kind of the capstone of it. And then he says, he's kind of looking back on all the commandments. And in brief, he says, look, I've laid before you two options. The one option leads to life and the other option leads to death, which is precisely what Jesus does, right? He says, I've preached my sermon, my most famous one, the Sermon on the Mount, and I get to the end of it all and I'm offering you two things. There's the one way that leads to life, and there's the one way that leads to death. So let's take a look at Deuteronomy 30. We'll start in verse 15, though. Deuteronomy 30, starting in verse 15, and we'll see what Moses says. Because this again is filling out this backstory that predates what Jesus is doing a few thousand years later. And so in verse 15, he says, see, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. And if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today. And then he explains like how to obey these commandments. There's 3 parts to it. So if you obey these commandments by one, loving the Lord your God, two, by walking in His ways, and three, by keeping His commandments and His statutes and His rules, well then you shall live and multiply. It's interesting to me, and I think it should be to you, that what Moses gives us here is, here's how to obey the commands. And he doesn't get around to actually telling you to obey the commands until.3. He starts with, you obey the commands by, right here, loving in your heart, loving the right thing, namely the Lord your God. And then the next part is you move from loving to doing the thing, to like walking in his ways. And then finally third, When you're doing that, you are finally keeping the commandments and the statutes and the rules and the instructions and all the things that Moses just laid out in the first five books of your Bible. And if you do those, well, that leads to life. This sounds a lot like what Jesus says, doesn't it? Like you should do these things. And Jesus knows, and frankly, Moses knows, and I'm gonna guess you all know too, that actually doing the thing is a whole lot harder than it seems. It's a whole lot harder. We'll finish up the passage here starting in verse 17. If your hearts turn away, and you will not hear, but you're drawn away to worship the other gods and you serve them, well, I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you're going over the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today. I have set before you again two options, life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life, that you and your offspring, your kids and their kids and their kids. they might live, loving the Lord your God, and here they are again, by the way, loving the Lord your God, obeying His voice and holding fast to Him, for He is your life, He is your length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob to give to them. Now I'll say, if I'm preaching a sermon like Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount, this is a great text to draw from because it's stirring, right? He's putting before you, like, are you going to choose the way to life or are you going to choose the way that leads to death? And then he gives us some ways to actually do this. But what Moses knows And what Jesus definitely knows and what you probably know too is that knowing the thing that you should do and having it sitting here in your heart to do it, two very different things. They say that the 18 inches from your head to your heart is the longest journey you can possibly take. To get something that you know to be true Down inside here, this is a lifetime of a journey. Turns out that knowing the law and doing the law are two entirely different life tasks. If I were to ask you right now, should you lie to your neighbor or your kids or to your pastor? You would most certainly say, of course not. I'm not going to do that. And if I were to say, should you steal from your workplace? should you take things from there? And no. Who's going to do that? Why would I do that? Should you defraud people out of their money? No. I'm not going to steal from somebody. Should you cheat on your spouse? No. way. Should you beat up your little brother, right? No, I shouldn't do that. But somehow the knowing of it is very different from the doing it. And you find yourself in places and doing things that you thought, I shouldn't be doing this. How did I get here? Why? am I here? And for some of you, it's why am I here again? And then again. And then again. You've probably met the doctor who dispenses all the advice and tells you, well, you shouldn't drink and you shouldn't smoke. And then you walk outside after your appointment and there's the doctor smoking away, right? Or I like to I know some ethicists who have PhDs in ethics, and I like to say that these are some of the most clever people knowing how to get around ethics and doing all the wrong things because in their mind they can make the mental gymnastics. Or maybe the lawyers who know all the rules, right? They know the laws, But do they keep them? That's a different thing. And here again, it's this length from the head down into the heart that we're trying to examine this morning. And it's the problem that Moses poses. Moses poses. And Jesus poses and I'm posing to you. What did Moses expect though? If we just back up a few verses to the beginning of what we were reading this morning. Starting in verse 11, Deuteronomy 30, 11, he says this. He says, the commandment that I'm commanding you today, it's not too hard. These are his words, not mine. This commandment, these set of laws, it's not too hard for you. And it's not far off. It's not in heaven up there somewhere that you should say, who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us that we may hear it and do it? And neither is it beyond the sea. It's not like way out there somewhere that you've got to say, who's going to go over the sea to find these commands and to tell us what it is to do? He says, no, it's none of that. The word is very near to you. It is in fact, it's in your very mouth, and it might even be in your heart, so that you can do it. And so Moses is clearly expecting these people, the Israelites, and frankly us, to do the right things. And he's saying it's not too hard. But if you know the Israelite story, What happens to these folks? Well, you just fast forward a few books and you get to the prophets and what is happening to them is the exact thing that's foreshadowed here at the end of Deuteronomy, which is that they are being ushered out of this promised land into a place called Babylon. And they're told very clearly why, which is that they weren't capable and they didn't keep the Mosaic law. They did all things that they shouldn't have done. And there's a people group that did things that they shouldn't have done. And now, well, now they're being ushered out of the promised land, the land of the living, and they are in exile. And this brings us to two more passages that connect deeply with what is happening both here and what Jesus will pick up on later. The first is Ezekiel, chapter 36, 26, and 27. Here, the Israelites are in this foreign land where they can't get back. It seems the promises have been broken. It seems the covenant between them and Yahweh is toast. And yet, God's not done with them. And he says the following. He says, I'll give you a new heart, and I will put this new spirit within you, and I'll remove the heart of stone from your flesh, and I'll give you a new 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. And he's basically saying here, a time will come when I will show you how to get this law in here. So it's not just up here in your head, but it's made its way into your heart somehow. And it appears that there's some sort of movement of the spirit that is involved in all of this. Well, then there's this other prophet, Jeremiah, speaking about the same time. Israel is in exile. They're in Babylon. And he too comes saying some promises about what's to come. And in verse 31, 31 and 33, Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. This won't be like the old covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. The very covenant, by the way, I was talking about in Deuteronomy chapter 30. And so Jeremiah is saying, it's not going to be like that one. That one was in stone. That one mostly lived up here in their heads, if it lived anywhere at all, but it never made its way down into their heart. And so he says, I've got to make a new covenant. And Jeremiah promises that God is making a new covenant. By the way, if you don't know, maybe you're new to all of this or maybe I just need to teach a little better, but we're going to take communion momentarily. We're going to use these exact words, so pay attention to what's happening here. And Jesus from that upper room is going to say to his disciples in the moment he's handing the bread and the cup to them, he's going to say, this is the new covenant in my blood. And he's using Jeremiah 31. He's directly echoing it. And he's saying, what's happening right now in this upper room? This is the new covenant. And this is where All of these promises back in your Old Testament are finally coming to fruition. Back to Jeremiah 31, 33 now, for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they will be my people. And so the problem back in Jeremiah's day is we need to know how to put the law in our hearts. This is the same problem today. I don't want you to think that you get scot-free out of here without somehow getting it inside of you. I know plenty of people who go by the name Christian and they got all the right things up here, but none of the right things sitting here and the way they live their life is not shaped by the law or by Christ or by anything connected to either of those. The big question for the day is, how does one get the law out there to in here? I want to point you to another passage in Scripture. By the way, if you want, you can just write these down and really dig into them later. But for now, I'll just keep burning through them. This is New Testament this time. This is Romans chapter 10. It's a very famous passage. You've probably heard it before, but if not, we'll certainly read it together. And I want you to notice that Paul here is quoting directly from our passage. He is quoting directly Deuteronomy chapter 30. And he says this, Moses writes, about the righteousness based on the law. That the person who does the commandments will live by them. But the righteousness based on faith says, and here's the quote from Deuteronomy 30, don't say in your heart, who will ascend into heaven? You remember this part of Deuteronomy 30? You can go back and read it again. But then Paul adds what's in the parentheses here. He says, that is to bring Christ down. And then he goes on, he says, who will descend into the abyss? This is the way Moses had written it was who will go out to the seas or beyond the seas, right? And then Paul says, that is to bring Christ up from the dead. But what does it say? And here's still Moses, right? The word is near you. It's in your mouth and in your heart. And this is Precisely. I mean, he's quoting directly from Deuteronomy chapter 30. But he's doing something very unique and you need to know precisely what he's doing. Do you see what he's done? When Moses is talking, Moses is talking about the law. Who will go up to the heavens and find the law up there to teach us how to live a life, right? Who will instruct us on the way we should live? And Moses says, you don't need to go up there. I'm giving it to you right now. And Moses says, you don't need to go over the seas to find the law and to bring it back because I'm telling you right now it's been given to you. But that's not what Paul does. Paul substitutes out the law for Christ. It's A radical move. You have to believe the Jews hearing this might be a little scandalized, But if they've been around the church for a few years, they will know Paul makes this kind of move on a regular basis. He reads his Old Testament and he sees Jesus on these pages. And specifically, he sees Jesus where the law is sitting. Jesus tells us in Matthew chapter 5, the very beginning of his most famous sermon, he says, I have not come to abolish the law, I have come to fulfill it. I've come to fill it out. And then Paul tells us what this looks like. He's telling us that if you want to know how to live a life and what it means to live abundant life and what it means to have eternal life and the way we were designed to be in this world, well then look no further than the person of Jesus. Paul has a very interesting take on the law generally speaking. But what he definitely does is he says, look at Jesus because Jesus fills out how this law was always meant to work. And if you want to know how this law was always supposed to bring you life, well then just simply do the kinds of things Jesus does. Paul doesn't stop here though. You see, Paul keeps going with this Deuteronomy passage and says something, again, very interesting and now this time very familiar to some of you. Verse 9, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. But the scripture says everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. We're still left with the question, how does one get the law from their head into their heart? And there are two ways I would want to offer you. One is far more important than the other way. The one way is God. This is an act of grace, a gift that God gives to you. And the other way is your part, the part you play in all of this. And both of these are really important. So what Paul is doing in this passage and what Jesus is teaching us is that in order to have this gift of the Spirit, And to get the law and the person of Jesus into your heart, it requires an act of grace on the part of God. And that we must confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord. And we must believe in our hearts that He has been raised from the dead. And if we do these things, then yes, we will be saved. Which is to say that the movement from the head down into the heart has begun. But then there's also the part that you play. And this is the part where you have to step in and you have to step up and you have to do the things that the law commands of you and that Jesus desires from you. And so if you want to get that 18 inches from the head down into the heart, what we're really saying is that you've got to make the faith that you have really real. It's got to mean something. It can't just stand out here somewhere. It's got to pierce your heart. This is not something I can do for you. I can teach you about it. I can speak to you, hopefully inspire you. But at the end of the day, this is a you thing. And you've got to want it. You've got to desire it. You've got to, use the scriptural term, you've got to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. In just a few seconds, we're going to take communion. The external and the internal are miles apart, and there will be people in the room who take the same bread and cup and they are taking it as an external act, a rote thing that you've done hundreds of times and let's go ahead and get this done so we can head off to lunch and all will be well. And then there are some of you who want to make it really real. who want to actually experience the body and the blood of Christ, who want to take communion because you want to encounter the living God. My prayer for you this morning is that you're in that second camp, is that you are doing what you need to be doing to get God in here. Quick word of warning, Some of you will say to me in private moments, God, or Eric, I've been trying this thing. Maybe you're praying, God, I've been trying this thing where I want to know you're in here and sometimes I just don't know. And I would say to you if you told me this, I get this. And I'm sorry that it doesn't feel real just yet. But I would encourage you to keep showing up. and to show up in this place and to show up reading your scripture, show up reading or praying to God and meeting with others who have a spiritual life that has clearly transformed them in some way and asked them, what was it like for you? What is it like for you? What is it like to follow Jesus for real along the way? And I assure you, over time, the small steps and acts of faith that you participate in will begin to seep its way down into the very core of who you are. Before you know it, you are being transformed and you are being changed into the Christ-like person that you were always meant to be. When we take the bread and the cup, we say, this is the body of Christ and it's broken for you. And this is the blood of Christ and it is shed for you. And this is for the forgiveness of your sins. We do ask for one more step. You and me, that is. And it's the Pentecost step. Pentecost is the day where the Spirit comes down. Because the tradition says that Jesus was raised from the dead and ascends to the Father and is seated at the right hand of God. And that's great and all, but we want the Spirit. We want something closer. We want God here with us. And so the promise is not just that Jesus is far off, but He sends His Spirit with us, to live in us, to participate in our transformation. So this is my prayer for you and for me this morning. Let us pray together. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as we gather around your table this morning, we ask for clean hearts and clean hands because we come with hard hearts and dirty hands. We know that we need you. We know that we have failed you and ourselves and the ones we love. But God, we know that forgiveness is available at this table. We know that you welcome us home with the open arms of the Father with his prodigal son. And so this morning, we come running. We come running back to you, God. But we also ask for a movement of the Spirit so that as we take these elements, or meet us in this place, meet me, meet each person who will walk up and will receive the body of Christ broken for them, the blood of Christ shed for them. Meet them, Lord. And when we eat and drink together, Lord, we will celebrate together what you have done. We pray this in Christ's holy name. Amen. If my communion service would come forward, we will begin. We have some new folks here with us today. The way we take communion goes like this. We come forward down the center aisle and there will be two stations. One will have, well, Each person will have a bread and a cup and you'll simply put your hands out and they will give you the body of Christ, which is broken for you. And then you'll grab the cup. Now if you need gluten-free or if you want a wafer that's not been touched by one of their hands, we have those where the cups are located as well. But then you'll take that back to your seats. We will take communion together as one body. While you're waiting in the pew with the bread and the cup in your hands, I would encourage you to do some reflecting, some praying, and see if we can't make this really real this morning. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread, he gave thanks, he broke it. The body of Christ broke it for you. And he took the cup And he said, this is the new covenant in my blood for the forgiveness of your sins. Please come forward the table is open.