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The Soil of the Heart
Written by Dr.
Lester Hutson
Copyright
- Lester Hutson - 1986
This material is copyrighted and may not be copied or reproduced
without the express written permission of Dr. Lester Hutson.
"What Causes Hard Hearts"
Job 38:38
B. A second cause of hard hearts is resistance to truth.
1. It's one thing to just inadvertently neglect truth. It's another thing to deliberately reject it or put it off. Some people do not let the truth of God's word cultivate their hearts by way of application. They intend to, but just never seem to get around to it. But sometimes a person's resistance to truth is not a matter of neglect. He's heard the truth and knows what he ought to do, but in his heart he says, "No". These are like the son of Matthew 21:28-29. The father said to him. "Son, go work today in my vineyard." But this son "answered and said, I will not."
2. I'll bet you've felt it in your own heart. You've sat through a sermon or stood at an invitation knowing what you were hearing was true. You knew in your soul God was speaking to your heart through His Word and messenger. You knew you had an attitude you ought to get rid of, but you hardened yourself. You felt the conviction of God about a bad habit, about enmity or an unresolved offence between you and a brother, or about an incident in your life where you sinned, but old self stood there like a stone saying, "No, No, No" in the heart. Time and again you've heard God's challenge about more time in prayer, more time in His Word and meditation. About becoming a consistent and active soulwinner, or about giving your life to preach His Word or go as a missionary, but secretly in your heart you've kept saying "No". I've heard people say, "I don't care what the Bible says about it."
3. The Bible refers to it as hardening your heart. God says, "Today if ye will hear his voice harden not your heart," Psalms 95:8 and Hebrews 3:8, 15 and 4:7. Deliberate rejection of truth is rebellion against God, and I Samuel 15:23 says, "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry." And, it will make you as hard as nails.
4. Not only that, but it will ultimately bring you down to sorrow and barren defeat and desolation of life. Job asked, "Who hath hardened himself against him, and hath prospered?" in Job 9:4. In the long run, not one. Anyone who hardens himself against God and prospers has prosperity but for a moment. It shall soon pass. It is Solomon who said, "He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy," Proverbs 29:1.
5. Many a hardhearted man is that way today because he's been deliberately resisting God and His truth for a long, long time.
C. A third cause of hardness of heart or spiritually compacted ground is self-righteousness.
1. The Bible says in Romans 12:3, "For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith."
There's really no justification for any person to be highminded. We're all just dust and only what we are by the grace of God. No wonder King David wrote in Psalms 39:4-5,
"Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity."
2. Yet, we get to feeling pretty good about ourselves. We get to listening to a Robert Schuller or Norman Vincent Peale and reading a few books on how to have a better self image, and old self begins to gloat. It swallows the "I'm OK, you're OK" line.
3. First news you know, we have this "have need of nothing" rationale of the Laodiceans. When God wrote them a letter in Revelation 3:17, He accused them of saying, "I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked."
4. Once we quit seeing ourselves as needy sinners, then we quit accepting the truths we need. Our self-righteousness begins to insulate us from the very words of truth which can keep us soft and workable soil. We start viewing what we hear and read as for someone else. We become blind to our own needs.
We're like the ole West Texas rancher who never missed a service at his little country church. And, after every service he'd say, "Preacher, you really told them tonight." This guy never saw himself as the object of a thing the preacher said. One night it was stormy, and only the preacher and the ole rancher showed up. The preacher thought, "Well, this ole boy will have to take it tonight. He'll know this whole sermon is just for him, because there's not another soul here." So, the preacher really poured it on. But after the sermon the ole rancher said, "My preacher, what a sermon! If they'd have been here, you'd have really told'um tonight."
5. Yes, self-righteousness makes the soil of your heart very hard to penetrate.
D. And this brings me to the fourth cause of hard ground or hardheartedness. I really think this one is just an advanced state of self-righteousness. I call it Pharisaical pride.
1. Pride is an over inflated opinion of one's self. Pride was the number one problem of the Pharisees who were the "Holier than thou" people of Jesus' day. They thought they knew more than everybody else and were somehow better than others. I've mentioned the Pharisee of Luke 18:11 who stood and prayed, "God I thank thee, that I am not as other men are."
2. Pride is the opposite of humility, and the prouder men get, the harder they get. They're the kind of people who get to somehow thinking that white men are better than Indians and Bereans are better than other Christians. They're the rich who look down their noses at the poor, and the poor call themselves "proud po' folks". They're the A&M graduates who snicker at the Sam Houston students, and the doctors and lawyers who view themselves almost as gods.
And they're the regular church goers who never miss a tithe, and who are right in the thick of things, and who look with scorn upon those who aren't.
3. You talk about hard, the hearts of Pharisaical people can resemble flint. In Capernaum on a sabbath day, Jesus went into a synagogue full of Pharisees, Mark 3 tells how there was a poor man in there who had a withered hand. Those Pharisees were so cold and hard they just stood around like vultures just daring Jesus to heal him so they could light into him. You'd have thought they'd have been filled with compassion for the poor man, but no. They were too hard to feel his hurt or care. Oh, how much like so many they are today. Verse 5 says Jesus "looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts."
Nothing I know of will make you harder of heart and more cruel and useless than Pharisaical pride.
E. Closely akin to Pharisaical pride is legalism. It too is a cause of hardheartedness.
1. Legalism focuses on practice, not principle, the outward appearance instead of the holiness of the inner man. Legalism insists on what, not why. It is satisfied with the letter of the law and has little interest in the spirit of the law. Legalism is more concerned about whether or not a man drinks a beer, says a cuss word, or wears seductive clothing than reaching that man with the truth that would clean up those bad habits.
Legalism will execute on the spot a man who falls. It knows little of tolerance, compassion or forgiveness. It's far more interested in policing men than in building men.
2. One of the big results of legalism is inconsistency and hardness. The legalist makes clean the outside of the cup, but leaves dregs on the inside. All of the Pharisees were legalists. Jesus said to them in Matthew 23:23-28,
"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful, outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."
Oh, the inconsistency of legalism! The exactingly correct exterior with the woefully depraved interior! The tyrannical insistence on perfect performance with the wholesale lack of tenderness, patience, forgiveness, understanding or a concern for what's in a man's heart! Truly legalistic people have some of the hardest spiritual soil in the world. They can crucify you without blinking an eye, if you don't do it just the way they think you should.
"It Does Make a Difference What You Believe"