Vestiges, Double-Hearts, and Drawbacks

Vestiges, Double-Hearts and Drawbacks I. The heart’s devotion to God is vital to our unimpeded success in following Christ. There is a place for godly emotion of the heart in Christian duty. A. Conversion is largely a matter of full submission from within to the will of God: making Him one’s first love. MAT 22:36-37; REV 2:4. 1. Belief should be from the heart, fully. ROM 8:8-10; ACT 8:37; PRO 3:5. 2. Jesus chided some of His followers for their sluggish hearts: they were lacking full internal trust in revealed truth. LUK 24:25. 3. Simon the sorcerer’s faulty conversion was owing to a corrupt heart. ACT 8:21. 4. If a man’s heart is not regenerated, he cannot be truly converted. JER 17:9 c/w EZE 36:26-27. 5. If a man’s heart has been turned over to blindness and darkness, he cannot be converted until the heart is turned back. JOH 12:40 c/w 2CO 3:14-16. a. God will be found of penitents that seek Him with all their heart. DEU 4:29. b. God will not be thus found of phony penitents’ hearts. JER 42:2, 20-22. B. Our obedience to God must be from the heart, an innate desire of the new man to sincerely do what is right in God’s sight. ROM 6:17; EPH 6:6. C. Double-heartedness (deceitfulness, dissembling, insincere, divided in allegiance) is to be rejected. 1CH 12:33 c/w PSA 12:2 ct/w ACT 2:46. D. Double-mindedness (undecided or wavering in mind) is a symptom of an impure heart. JAM 4:8 ct/w ROM 4:20-21. E. What we value most highly will control our hearts. MAT 6:21 c/w 2TI 4:3-4. F. If God is our chief delight, He is also the chief of our hearts and our desires will be properly ordered and so granted accordingly. PSA 37:4-5. G. Devotion to God demands discerning the one right way and then setting your heart on that. JOS 24:15 ct/w 2KI 17:33, 41; MAT 6:24; 1CO 10:21. II. Scripture presents many warnings by command and example about semi-dedicated hearts, undedicated hearts and reversions. A. Israel, having come out of Egypt, had an Egyptian hangover: the vestiges of their former life in Egypt still influenced them. EXO 16:3; NUM 11:5. 1. They in their hearts turned back to Egypt because they had not set their hearts aright. ACT 7:39 c/w PSA 78:8. 2. They were out of Egypt but Egypt was not out of them. 3. Converts should beware of this tendency under duress of thinking fondly of the times of former bondage to sin/error for the pleasures of that season. Faith teaches us otherwise. HEB 11:24-27; 10:38-39. 4. Those who come to Christ need to be ashamed of their former sins and the lifestyle that accommodated them or that spiritual leprosy will spread and win. ROM 6:21 c/w 1PE 4:1-5. B. Christ expressly warned against looking back and turning back. LUK 9:62; 17:32. 1. We often think of the Sodomish heart of Lot’s wife but Lot himself wasn’t exactly a willing receiver of salvation and his later actions were unbecoming of a just man. GEN 19:16, 32-36. 2. Those who willingly flee sin and error are more likely to succeed in their walk with Christ than those who have to be dragged away from sin and error. 3. There are some temptations that are best fled, not fought, and especially not flirted Vestiges, Double-Hearts and Drawbacks 6-8-25 Page 1 of 2  with. 1CO 6:18; 10:14. C. The Galatian churches had started out well but revived some of their former errors. GAL 4:8-10; 5:1. D. For a convert, the only “looking back” that is beneficial is a remembrance of being delivered from bondage. EXO 13:3 c/w HEB 10:32-34. E. Paul shows us the best way to deal with the sin and error of our past and their associated benefits. PHIL 3:7-14. F. The auxiliaries of sin may have to be tangibly destroyed and deemed repulsive in order to break their hold on our hearts. DEU 7:25-26; ISA 30:22; ACT 19:19-20. III. Paul uses the marriage covenant to analogize our commitment to Jesus Christ. Keep in mind that our salvation is owing to “...the blood of the everlasting covenant” (HEB 13:20), which is the New Covenant of which Jesus Christ is the mediator (HEB 12:24) and that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. EPH 5:25. A. In ROM 7:1-6, Paul compares conversion to Jesus Christ as a woman formerly bound to a husband who is now dead and so is free to marry again. 1. The Law and the motions of sins by the Law are the dead former husband. 2. Until her husband died, she could not marry another. Thus, the elect could not relate to God in the liberty of the New Covenant before Christ mortified the Law by His own death. 3. The Christ Who died to abolish the Law and its entails rose again. Thus, the elect relate to God through Christ under His New Covenant in newness of spirit. 4. Therefore, to attempt to relate to God through Jesus Christ using the vestiges of the Old Covenant (sabbaths, holy days, dietary law, etc.) or continuing in sin or the modes of false worship we once embraced would be analogous to a remarried widow insisting on keeping the corpse of her former husband in the home or plastering the headboard of the marriage bed with polaroids of her former love- making. Her new husband might justifiably wonder if he is her first love. B. In 2CO 11:1-2, Paul describes his converting of the Corinthians as espousing them as chaste virgins to one husband: Christ. 1. Christ alone should be the object of their love and devotion, not their old man of sin, “another Jesus” (v. 4), former idols (1CO 12:3), false modes of worship, etc. 2. Of all such pre-Christ interfering rival affections, Paul said, “...such WERE some of you...” (1CO 6:9-11). C. In both of the above scenarios there is a warning about entering into covenant with Christ while still being in love with a former lover. 1. If something else is the object of our heart’s affection, Christ is not really the convert’s first love, He is only a substitute settled for. 2. NOTE: few things can damage a natural marriage relationship more than a spouse who is still emotionally invested in a former lover. If you sense the hurt that could generate in a marriage, consider how much you hurt Christ by doing likewise. D. Joining to Christ demands that we make Him our first love in all things. 1. Converts should forsake sin. 2. Converts should forsake the patterns and principles of false systems of religion they have been involved in. 3. Past error should be loathed, not loved. 4. Order your hearts to love Christ first and always without reservation or allegiance to any other. Vestiges, Double-Hearts and Drawbacks 6-8-25 Page 2 of 2