1/19/25 - Matthew 7: Out of the Heart
Envy
Drives pretentiousness
Envy is the twisted expression of jealousy. Positive jealousy is defined as fiercely protective and vigilant of one’s rights or possessions.
James - God jealously yearns for the spirit He’s made to dwell in us
Negative jealousy looks at what others have and is fiercely discontent with themselves and resentful of other’s qualities, achievements, or possessions.
Envious people often become hypocrites to one-up others to both feel better about themselves and to elicit the same miserable feeling of envy in others. Envy is selfish to the core and cannot stand being alone.
Feeds evil motives
Evil jealousy, irrational anger, murderous thoughts, conniving, boasting, heartlessness, and trampling over others, particularly the poor and the vulnerable, all are motivated by envy.
Get rid of envy, and you eliminate an entire tree of wickedness. Eradicate envy out of the human race and you eradicate most of what separates mankind from God and the evil seed that causes people to destroy one another.
Gives birth to criticism
Good judgment is necessary. In the same sermon, Jesus warns people about judging while also giving them the tools to discern a true follower from a false, a true prophet, and a teacher from a false. However, discerning people utilize fair balances and are quicker to look inward first for falsity. A discerning person also withholds expressing constructive criticism to people who aren’t ready or willing to receive it.
A quick way to tell if your heart is overcome by envy: how quick are you to dish out criticism, and how well do you take it?
Envious people can’t keep their mouths shut; they will always point, always fight, always bicker, and always be the victim. They will not suffer introspection but will grasp at the smallest issues in others to avoid the reality of their own lives and the evil of their own hearts.
Self-justifying
Speck finding
Proverbs is pretty grim when it comes to the description and outcome of foolish people. Yet Proverbs relates that there is more hope for a fool than for someone who is right in their own eyes.
Envy drives people to justify their actions despite the obvious wrongness of their activity to both man and God. As we’ve seen, speck-finding, always being outwardly critical, is not only hypocrisy, but it’s an effort to self-justify. For instance, if I can make you feel shame and guilt over your irritableness, I can make you feel inferior to me despite my rage or harsh treatment, and the narcissism of envy would have me believe that I am right in doing so and feeling like I am the righteous party, blind to my own evil.
But it’s not just envy. Envy is usually the root of many evil motivations, but there are other causes scripture points to: the love of gain, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life. Our finger-pointing at others is a defense mechanism for sin to escape scrutiny.
Ear-tickling
Another way that we justify ourselves for our evil hearts is by seeking out teachers who will make us feel comfortable, agree with us, or simply won’t challenge us on our beliefs or, especially, our practices. And so you see people hopping from one church to another, one teacher to another, looking for the best ear candy that suits their desires.
But it’s not contained to the teachers we listen to; it’s the way we speak to each other and the way we deal with accountability. We can easily become flattering tongues for others because we want to make people feel comfortable with their sin so that we can feel justified in ours.
So Jesus warns us of false teachers and false disciples. They're known by their fruit, by what they do, and especially by what they say.
He doesn’t warn us about false disciples so that we can be on guard to expose the false disciples but as a measuring line for ourselves, to give us a guideline by which we can determine the state of our own hearts.
He warns us against false prophets in part to get rid of that temptation to bail on someone just because of personal preferences or minor scruples, and especially so that we aren’t actively doing so to find someone who will speak exactly what we want them to say.
Self-righteousness
Whatever our strategy for self-justifying, it’s always out of self-righteousness. Ezekiel 33:13 gives us a good idea of what self-righteousness looks like,
“If I tell a righteous person that they will surely live, but then they trust in their righteousness and do evil, none of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered.”
We see that exact thing at play in what Jesus warns as the outcome of all of this. Not everyone who calls Jesus Lord is truly under His lordship. They cite the good things they have done in hopes that it will justify the evil and unrepentant state of their hearts. They never knew God, envy, lust, and pride guided their lives and when they come face to face with Jesus, they hope that flattering words and professions of things done for Him will satisfy Him.
But God is not mocked. The deceit with which we deceive others and ourselves about the state of our evil hearts doesn’t deceive God. The inner motivations of our hearts are laid bare before God, and He sees that even the good that we do is tainted and motivated by sin, so how do we suppose that we can stand blameless before God and on the merit of our own good deeds try to convince God that we are worthy of Him?
How do we escape the envy, lust, and pride of our hearts? How can we stand before Jesus one day and be accepted by Him?
Love
(Expressed by) Repentance
Jesus essentially says, Why do you point the finger at others and not yourself? Deal with your own heart.
1 Cor 11:31, “If judged ourselves, we would not be judged by God.”
If we were discerning about our own actions, intentions, and motivations, we would not be convicted and condemned because if we did so, we would repent and live differently.
Repentance is a change of heart, from being complacent to sin to being grieved by it. Repentance is also a change of actions, from doing what’s wrong to doing what’s right.
Something we do that we often call repentance is simply feel bad or apologize, but more often than not, we keep on our merry way and don’t lift a finger to change what we’re doing
The door leading to life is dreadfully narrow. It’s much easier to point the finger, live in envy, self-justify, and hope to high heaven that, in the end, either we succeed in fooling God or find that He doesn’t exist. Christ is the door to God; there is no other way to Life, and the path to Life is only as wide as repentance.
(Expressed by) Relationship
The call to repentance is primarily to restore us to our source.
Isaiah 59:12
Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.When we see Adam in the Garden, God walks with him in the cool of the evening. This is a picture of intimate friendship. God created us for this, and at the root of it, sin, envy, and the pursuit of reputation and power are all attempts to fill that chasm in our souls where the presence of God ought to be. Repentance restores us to right relationship, it breaks down the wall that divides us.
Envy tries to get us ahead because we feel we deserve the good life has to offer, but envy attempts to achieve that good at the expense of others. What is the solution to this? Realizing that Jesus loves us. By His blood, we have become children of God.
Jesus assured us twice over in this sermon that God values us and desires to provide us with good things.
The solution to envy, the avenue to repentance from the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is to realize that God is good, desires good for us, and desires us to nurture relationship with Him. What does Jesus say to do for that? Ask.
James writes that you have not because you ask not, and because you do not have, you envy what others have. Jesus said, ask, and it will be given to you so that your joy may be complete.
The remedy for the wicked heart is friendship with God. This is what Jesus says to those who professed him but whose hearts weren’t His, “I never knew you.” In Greek, what that phrase means is, “We never had a relationship.”
Only God can change the heart. Speaking through Ezekiel to Israel, God says, “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit. I will remove the hardness of your heart. I will put my Spirit in you so that you can follow me.” God does this in the process of a relationship.
Faith
We have to have faith from the heart.
The continual refrain in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel is, “They honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.
Faith is not mere belief in God. James writes, “You believe that God is one. You do well, the demons believe—and tremble.” Faith in God is belief and response. A belief that leads to repentance.
We must have faith evidenced by action
James writes that faith without works is dead. How do we respond to belief? We act. When we know a thing displeases God we stop and we do what He says is right.
But it can’t be simply doing the things to check the box to satisfy ourselves that our faith isn’t dead. Again, it comes back to motivation, relationship, and attention. If we aren’t in relationship with God, our faith will be in vain, and our actions obligatory. Faith ought to move us toward love, and a heart full of love is responsive to the one it loves.
Love is at the heart of Jesus' sermon. To love God and love others sums up the entirety of the law and the prophets. To love God and love others is how we avoide and escape the grasping clutches of envy, lust, and pride. And if we take to heart what Jesus says and put it into practice, our lives will have a stability that is unshakeable despite the storms of life because our lives will have their foundations in the love of God.