![]() ![]() In our hearts we store up faith or doubt, love or hatred, grace or vengeance. In our hearts we store up the Word of God, or, conversely, messages that run counter to it. In our hearts, we store up everything that motivates and moves us. Proverbs 4:23 instructs us to “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (ESV). We have real free will and a real ability to respond, and in a real sense we shape ourselves by the things we choose to receive and the way we choose to respond.īut nothing originates with us. ![]() I am not trying to negate human personality and individuality: there is a real “you” in you, a unique and potentially immortal creature with agency and personality. If we are going to be good, it will be because we receive good things from God. (“What do you have that you didn’t receive?” Paul asked in another context, 1 Corinthians 4:7). Since this isn’t true, we have to admit that we are, first and foremost, receivers and responders. In our own strength, we somehow created ourselves - our own powers, our own potential, our own personality. If we were to argue than anything has originated with us, we would have to argue that we self-originated, that we sprang into being all by ourselves. Yes, everything, including those things we were born with, those things woven into our DNA, even our own creative powers. The same is true of everything we store in our hearts. To return to the analogy of a storeroom: things in a storeroom come from outside of that room. We can be good people, people who mirror the goodness of God, but the goodness that shines through us will come from him and through him, and it will manifest in our lives as - and only as - we receive his gifts. Goodness itself is a fruit of the Spirit, as Galatians 5:22 assures us. Everything good comes from God everything good is his gift. James tells us that “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17, NKJV). Yet here, Jesus took the Pharisees to task both because they could not tell the difference between a good man and a bad one and also because they had allowed so much evil to accumulate in their hearts, only to overflow through their mouths. In another place, Jesus poked at a man who addressed him as “good teacher” by saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good-except God alone” (Mark 10:18, NIV). After all, as the Reformers always insisted, we cannot make ourselves good. I think this is an important distinction. We collect those things that shape us.Īnd yet, we are not creators of ourselves. So when it comes to the storeroom of our hearts, we play a pivotal role. (The entire Sermon on the Mount, for example.) If we didn’t, the Scriptures wouldn’t be full of admonitions and commands - not just in the Old Testament, but in the New, most especially in the very words of Jesus. While it all begins and ends with grace, we nevertheless have a role to play. ![]() When it comes to the new creation life of Jesus, there is a very real sense in which we participate with God to bring that life to fruition. How, then, can those who are evil say anything good? What is needed is a change of heart.” Out of the ‘heart’, the center of human personality, the ‘mouth speaks,’ revealing what is in the heart. In commenting on this passage, the Expositor’s Bible Commentary sums it up well: “Verse 35 makes a tight connection with v.33: what a person truly is determines what that person says and does. A good man produces good things from his storeroom of good, and an evil man produces evil things from his storeroom of evil. How can you speak good things when you are evil? For the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.
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