Living in the Kingdom: The Freedom of a New Heart

REFLECTION QUOTES

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.”

~Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

~Voltaire (1694-1778), French Enlightenment philosopher

“…the heart [cannot be] left without an object. Its desire for one particular object may be conquered; but…its desire for having some one object or other, this is unconquerable…. Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system.”

~Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), Scottish minister, professor and social reformer

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”

~St. Augustine (354-430), North African bishop

“Look around and you will see systems and processes of justification everywhere in human affairs…. Other animals communicate, struggle for dominance, and form alliances. But they don’t justify why they do what they do. We are the justifying animal.”

~Dr. Gregg Henriques, professor of psychology at James Madison University

“Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, ‘My life for your life.’”

~Dr. Tim Keller, pastor in Manhattan (NYC)

“To see the law by Christ fulfilled
And hear His pard’ning voice,
Transforms a slave into a child,
And duty into choice.”

~John Newton (1725-1807), writer of “Amazing Grace”

SERMON PASSAGE

Mark 7

5 And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” 6 And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,

“‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me;
7 in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines the
commandments of men.’”
17 And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. 18 And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, 19 since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) 20 And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. 21 For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22 coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. 23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Mark 8
31 And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 And he said this plainly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.”
34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?”