Swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in a court of law is a big deal.
But what about swearing in the context of everyday relationships? Swearing an oath of any size or shape is such a big deal that Jesus talks about it in the Sermon on the Mount. Today, what Jesus meant when he said, let what you say be simply yes or no. From Chicago, welcome to The Moody Church Hour with Pastor Philip Miller. Stay with us for a time of worship and teaching as we continue a series on the upside down kingdom.
From the book of Matthew, we'll learn about manipulation on the lips. Here now is Pastor Philip. Well, welcome to Moody Church this morning. We're so glad you're here. Whether you're in the room online or joining us by radio, this is the place to be this morning.
We're glad you're here. You know, today we're going to be talking about manipulation on the lips and the importance of keeping our oaths. It's the section that Jesus brings up today in the Sermon on the Mount, and it's all about integrity. Having our yes be yes and our no be no. And the new heart of the kingdom makes us into the kind of people who keep our promises, keep our vows.
And so we're going to be talking about the importance of being people of integrity today. So would you stand with me and let's pray as we seek the Lord. Heavenly Father, would you come and teach us today what it means to be people of integrity, wholeness, integration, like you. You are one. You are whole.
You are real through and through. And the life of the kingdom that you want to bring to us by the power of the Spirit, this new heart that Jesus can give us, can make us into people of wholeness who reflect your character in nature. We want to follow you.
We want to become like you. Help us today. We pray for Jesus' sake. Amen. To our God. Glory, hallelujah, is to our God. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Every praise, every praise is to our God.
Sing hallelujah to our God. Glory, hallelujah is to our God. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Every praise is to our God.
Every word of worship is one of four. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Sing hallelujah to our God. Glory, hallelujah is to our God. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Every praise is to our God.
Every word of worship is one of four. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Sing hallelujah to our God. Glory, hallelujah is to our God. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Every praise is to our God.
Every word of worship is one of four. Every praise, every praise is to our God. Sing hallelujah to our God. Glory, hallelujah is to our God.
Every praise, every praise is to our God. God my Savior. God my healer. God my deliverer. Yes He is. Yes He is. God my Savior. God my healer. God my deliverer. Yes He is.
Yes He is. Every praise is to our God. Every word of worship is one of four. Every praise, every praise is to our God.
Every praise, every praise is to our God. You have been our dwelling place, O everlasting God. Before You formed the mountain tops, You were before it all.
And soon our lives turned back to dust. When the sun comes up, satisfy us. Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness.
Satisfy us with Your love. You have been our dwelling place, O everlasting God. Before You formed the mountain tops, You were before it all. And soon our lives turned back to dust. When the sun comes up, satisfy us. Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness. Satisfy us with Your love.
The wrath of God poured out for sin on Jesus' crucified. Consider Him our hiding place. Our shelter is alive. Because He lived and died for us. When the sun comes up, satisfy us. Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness.
Satisfy us with Your love. Teach us, Lord, to number our days on earth and give us more wisdom in the secret heart as You display amazing grace in Jesus Christ for us. Teach us, Lord, to number our days on earth and give us more wisdom in the secret heart as You display amazing grace in Jesus Christ for us. When the sun comes up, satisfy us. Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness.
Satisfy us with Your love. When the sun comes up, satisfy us. Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness. Satisfy us with Your love. When the sun comes up, satisfy us.
Before the day has passed us up. Before our hearts forget all Your goodness. Satisfy us with Your love. Lord, help us to let You work, not try to work around You, to cease striving to be still and know that You are God in these days. Give us an undivided heart and help us give our desires to You.
In Jesus' name, amen. A few weeks ago, my daughter Violet came up to me and she had a little bit of concern etched across her face and she was worried about her eyes. She had started to notice that objects at distance were a bit fuzzy at points and she wasn't sure what was going on. So we made an eye exam appointment and we were fully expecting that since Krista and I are both nearsighted, that was probably what the issue was. So we go through all the tests that they normally do. Boy, that's stressful, isn't it? A or B, A or B.
It's like, I don't know. Anyway, all those tests and it turns out she didn't have any problems with her vision at distance. She was 100 percent. It was working. We were like, what's going on? And so it turns out what the issue was, your eyes have a focusing system and when you're working up close, doing lots of reading and schoolwork and that sort of thing, your eyes can get strained. And then when they try to focus at distance, they have trouble dialing it in.
They get tired. And so what we needed actually in the prescription, she got this mild prescription for her glasses. And it turns out it's all about up close work in order to help her then have the energy in the focusing system to focus at distance. So that's the prescription that she got.
Now, why do I bring that up? Well, it's one thing to understand the symptoms. It's another to get the diagnosis right. Right. And the key to the effectiveness of the prescription is the accuracy of the diagnosis. And this is what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount.
He's operating like a doctor. And the symptoms in this world of the brokenness of humanity are obvious, aren't they? Murder, rage, violence, cheating, adultery, infidelity, broken marriages and promises in the homes. There's so many more than that. But I list these because these are the topics that Jesus has already been engaged with. And the symptoms of all the brokenness of humanity are obvious in this world, aren't they?
I mean, everyone can agree. Those are the things that are wrong. The diagnosis is harder.
That's the difficult part. The religious leaders of Jesus' day, the scribes and the Pharisees, diagnosed the problem with humanity as largely behavioral. The problem is we have bad, sinful habits. And the key is we need to break those habits and replace them with new habits to do good. So they prescribed, the prescription fits the diagnosis, they prescribed a long list of do's and don'ts all in the service of reforming behavior to make people good. This is what most religion attempts to do. Here's a list of rules.
Now you go keep them. Work really, really hard at being really, really good by keeping all the rules that God expects. But Jesus has a totally different diagnosis here. Jesus is showing us in the Sermon on the Mount that the problem is not just out there in our behavior, in our habits. It's actually in our hearts. It's on the inside that our behavior is symptomatic. It flows from our hearts. That murder flows from anger in our hearts. That adultery flows from lust in our hearts. That divorce flows from hardness in our hearts.
So we can modify all our behavior all day long, all we want. But unless we deal with the problem in our hearts, unless our hearts are transformed on the inside, we're never going to be truly right. We're never going to be the people that God wants us to be in. So Jesus prescription is different than the Pharisees. Jesus prescription is you need a new heart. I need a new heart. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, follow me, come to me and I will give you a new heart, a new abundant life in the kingdom of heaven. By my spirit, my power and presence, I will take your heart of stone and I will change it into a heart of flesh and tenderness. He's giving us a series of illustrations of what that kind of heart actually looks like.
This is what we've looked at for the last few weeks. I can take your heart of anger and bitterness and I can turn it into something full of peace and reconciliation. I can take your heart that is captivated by lust and I will turn it into one of self-giving love and loyalty. I can take your heart that is hard and prone to divorce and breaking your promises and I can make you tender and faithful, full of mercy on the inside. And today we come to a fourth illustration of this kind of heart, the heart that Jesus can give us. And it's a heart that Jesus says doesn't swear oaths, but simply says yes and no. Now, I don't know about you, but when I read this, I'm like, wait a minute, that feels like an abrupt shift. I mean, these are clearly moral issues, all this stuff.
And now we're talking about oaths? I don't even have a problem with this, right? Hold on, what's going on? This is weird. Just me?
Anybody else feel like this is a weird shift? Well, let's look at it. Let's see what Jesus is doing here.
Let's dig in. Matthew 5, 33 down to 37. Let's read these verses. I'll give you kind of our outline for this morning and we'll pray and jump in.
Okay? Matthew 5, 33. Again, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn. But I say to you, do not take an oath at all, either by heaven for it is the throne of God or by the earth for it is his footstool or by Jerusalem for it is the city of the great king. Do not take an oath by your head for you cannot make one hair white or black. Some of us have tried. Verse 37, let what you say be simply yes or no.
Anything more than this comes from evil. So let's let Jesus be our doctor this morning, shall we? Let's look at the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the prescription of Dr. Jesus.
Okay? Let's pray and jump in. Father, we love you and we ask that you would do some heart surgery on us this morning. This whole series, this section has been powerfully insightful into the way that we live and operate and the problems that lie deep in our heart.
Do that again. Help us to see it. See who we are. See how our words are reflective of our hearts and the wholeness that you can bring us on the inside. We open ourselves up. We hold nothing back this morning.
Teach us, change us, and make us new. For Jesus' sake. Amen. Amen.
First, let's look at the symptoms here. Jesus in this passage is once again pitting himself against not the Old Testament law, but the teaching of the Pharisees as they applied that Old Testament law to life. The Old Testament law required truthfulness both before God and before man. You'll remember that the ninth commandment forbids bearing false testimony against your neighbor. A text that's relevant to what we're talking about this morning is Numbers 30 verse 2 or Deuteronomy 23 verse 21, both of which talk about keeping the vows that you swear before God. If you make a promise before God, you better keep it. So the Old Testament is clear that we are, God's people are to speak truth and to keep our word.
Right? We're to speak truth and keep our word. Now, when Jesus engages in all this talk about swearing oaths on various things, he's interacting with the case law surrounding truthfulness.
This is the casuistry, to use a legal term, the case law of how speaking truth and keeping your word plays out in everyday life. And in doing so, he's taking the Pharisees to task. This is not the only time Jesus will attack the Pharisees on this topic.
Another extended passage is in Matthew 23 verses 15 down to 22. This is what Jesus says there. Woe to you blind guides.
He's talking about the Pharisees. Woe to you blind guides who say, if anyone swears by the temple, it's nothing. But if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he's bound by his oath.
You blind fools for which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred. And if you say, if anyone swears by the altar, it's nothing. But if anyone swears by the gift that's on the altar, he is bound by his oath. You blind men for which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred. So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. Whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. Now if you're lost and confused, and this feels very foreign to you, welcome to the crowd.
Okay? What on earth is going on in these passages? Well, we have to go back to the first century. The first century, Jewish people would routinely swear oaths, make promises using oaths to verify their truthfulness. You could see the kinds of things they would swear upon in these lists that Jesus reads. Heaven, earth, Jerusalem, temple, their own bodies, sacrifices, the temple, gold, etc.
And so much of the kind of thing we still do today, we just change the template. So we say, I swear, I promise it's true on my mother's grave. You know, on a stack of Bibles, on all that is holy, scouts honor, right?
With God as my witness. Or in court we'll say, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God, right? Now why do societies consistently develop swearing oaths like this?
Let's think like anthropologists this morning. Why do people swear oaths like this? Isn't it because we know deep down that people tend to be less than truthful?
This is not new. People are out there who are trying to pull the wool over our eyes. We try to tell the story in a way that they end up looking good. They have agendas, they're working the angles, and we know from experience that people will say whatever is in their best interest most of the time, especially under pressure.
People end up breaking promises, shifting the blame, hiding the truth, avoiding accountability, saving face. And so what happens is we've invented this thing, swearing oaths, in order to assert our credibility in the face of doubt. So when people doubt us, we feel the need to say, no, no, no, no, no, I'm being truthful, and I show that by using an oath or swearing something. Even kids pinky swear, right?
Right? When you're five years old, you feel the need to do this. That's why we put people under oath on the stand in a courtroom so that they will feel the weight and consequence of the words that they use. Now, in Jesus' day, it was common for the Jewish people to swear oaths to establish their credibility with others.
There's nothing new about that. But what we're watching here, we're seeing the symptoms of what the Pharisees worked out in terms of the various levels of oaths that could be taken, each with different weightiness before God. So at some of these different levels, you see them here, the earth and heaven, the temple, the gold of the temple, the altar, the sacrifice on the altar, the Pharisees were working out, and they taught people to do this, that a broken vow was to be taken only as seriously as the object upon which it was sworn. A broken vow was only to be taken as seriously as the object upon which it was sworn. So the more holy the object, the more serious the breach was. So the closer the object was to the holy presence of God, the more serious the vow was considered to be because you were invoking the presence and weight of God in your promise. So if you swore by something that was sacred to God, like the holy temple in which he dwells, it meant you were invoking the presence of God for your vow, and you couldn't break it. That was an indefensible, you could not justify breaking a vow that you had made based off the holy presence of where God dwells, right? But if you swore by something more mundane, like I swear by my front door, you know, that's less sacred, it's your own house, it's not as big of a deal. So you see the logic, it's kind of messed up, and it's ripe for abuse, isn't it?
You can imagine the abuse. Let's say somebody comes to you and they need some money and they say, I swear by the temple, I'll pay you on Friday. It's payday, I'll be able to pay you. I swear by the temple, I'll pay you on Friday. And then Friday comes and goes and they haven't paid up. And you say, hey, you have to pay me, you promised.
And he says, I didn't promise. You say, yeah, you did, you swore on the temple. Oh, on the temple? Yeah, that's the presence of God. You got to treat that as holy.
Why, why aren't you paying me? Oh, well, were you thinking of the gold shiny, you know, inner sanctum of the temple when I said temple? Oh, oh, I, you know, I was thinking of the pavement stone on the outside of the step on the very perimeter of the temple. Like that's, we just walk on that. Oh, isn't this understanding, you know?
Whoops, sorry, my fingers were crossed, right? This is silly. You can see all of this nonsense in Jesus' rebuke in Matthew 23. If anyone swears by the temple, it's nothing, it's no big deal. But if you swear by the gold of the temple, oh, the golden part of the temple, that, that you have to keep your promise, right? If you swear by the altar, it might be the leg of the altar that's just touching the ground, the dirty part. Like, oh, that's not a big deal.
That's what I was thinking about. But if it's the gift on the altar, there's no way out of that because that's sacred to the Lord. You see the nonsense. And Jesus looks at this and he says, this is full of untrustworthy manipulation and exploitation. This is full of untrustworthy manipulation and exploitation. The only reason you need these vows in the first place is because you're untrustworthy people.
That's the issue here. The fact that you have to use vows and swear oaths like this is an indicator of the low trust culture of your hearts, your relationships. And so these oaths are actually ways that you're manipulating each other.
You're manipulating each other. You're trying to convince someone to believe you so they'll do what you want and so you can get what you are after. That's what you're doing with these oaths. You're trying to power over someone else's defenses and make them do what you want. I swear it's true.
You can believe me. And these vows are prone to exploitation. That the way you're using them, you're just wriggling off the hook here, guys. You're creating loopholes and fine print so you can deceive and defraud each other.
You go in planning an exit strategy. You make a promise intending never to keep it. Jesus says all these vows, all these levels of oaths, all these escape clauses that you've built into the system, it's symptomatic of a deeper problem that runs all the way into your heart. You've looked at the symptoms.
Now let's make a diagnosis. Jesus says this behavior of oath taking, of vows swearing and these loopholes and fingers crossed and fine print contracts, it all comes down to the fact that your yeses so often don't mean yes. And your noes so often don't mean no. And he says that's a problem in your hearts. There's entire industries in this world that exist to make yeses mean noes and to make noes mean yeses.
Right? He says this is a heart problem ultimately. It's a heart that's diseased with disintegrated and coercive self-interest.
It's a heart that is diseased with disintegrated and coercive self-interest. And the reason, Jesus says, that we swear oaths is we're trying to get people to believe us and it's because baseline we're not very trustworthy. We're untrustworthy people because our hearts lack integrity. Our hearts lack integrity. Remember math?
Math, we've learned about integers, whole numbers and fractions, divided numbers, right? The integrity, integer is wholeness. Integrity means consistency, an integrated whole. This is the idea behind integrity. No duplicity, no double talk, no disintegration in who we are. Psalm 15 speaks of a righteous man who walks with integrity, speaks truth in his heart and swears to his own hurt and does not change. Even when it's hard, he keeps his word. If you have a heart of integrity, friends, you won't need to swear oaths. That's Jesus' point. Your yes will simply mean yes.
Your no will simply mean no. People will know they can trust you on the basis of your word because you're a person of integrity. But the problem is we're not people of integrity.
We're disintegrated beings. We lack the integrity that God desires and we're full of coercive self-interest. He says, look, behind all of these oaths you're swearing, you're trying to manipulate people. You're trying to get them to trust you and do what you want. You're trying to control them. You're trying to coerce them and gain power over other people with the words you're using. You're using people for your own ends. Don't you see that? And then when you break your promises or as you write loopholes into your contracts, as you cross your fingers behind your back, you're defrauding and deceiving other people.
You're selfish, self-interested to the core. And the Pharisees told everybody it was okay for them to do this, to exploit all these little technicalities in the law. But Jesus said, look, I'm telling you, you need a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. You need to be perfect as your heavenly Father in heaven is perfect.
You need a heart full of integrity and faithfulness that keeps its word and its promises. Now, unless we think poorly of the Pharisees and just think this is their problem and not ours, we've got to realize we are chock full of the kind of selfish duplicity that Jesus says has to go. We're full of it. Of course, sometimes we outright lie, right? We just come up against the pressure and we back down and we lie, we say something, and that's obviously wrong.
But sometimes we engage in low-level, socially acceptable deceit. Have you noticed? Remember the movie Zorro? This is a while back, Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas, right? And Don Diego at one point says to Zorro, he says, a nobleman is nothing but a man who says one thing and thinks another.
That's what I'm talking about. Polished, civilized deceit. Let me give you five of them. First one, obvious one, little white lies. Little white lies. Don't you love how we've labeled this? What a self-deceiving label. That's just a little white lie. It's no big deal.
Just a little bit of lack of integrity. Just a small crack. It's okay.
We can patch that up. Good grief. Second one, polite untruths. Polite untruths. Oh, I'd love to go, but I'm busy that day. You're not busy.
Exaggerations, right? You always do this. You never do this. It was the absolute best.
It was amazing. When we do that, when we inflate our words, we devalue the currency, right? And then it doesn't mean as much. We lose credibility when you're over-exaggerating all the time. Fourth one, spin. This is, oh, our world is full of spin.
Selective use of the facts in order to shade things a certain way so that we can advance our narrative or our agenda, right? The fifth one is flattery. Flattery.
This is telling people what they want to hear, right? What did you think of my performance? It was great.
That was really good. Jesus is warning us that our words are telling. Our words are revealing something about our hearts, about what's going on on the inside. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
Luke 6 45. And when our hearts are full of integrity, our yeses mean yes, and our nos mean no. We don't have to dress it up with a vow.
It's just it's who we are. But when our hearts are full of disintegrity, our yeses mean no and our nos mean yes, and that separation is the problem. You can dress it up with a vow.
You can try to manipulate or get your way out of it. Jesus says anything more than the pure integrity of a yes means yes and a no means no. All the shade and nuance and excuses we make. In verse 37, anything more than this comes from evil. It's a strong word, isn't it? Evil.
Jesus means that. He says it's evil working in and through us when we live in this kind of disintegrated self. There will be five evils that come out of this kind of disintegrity. Number one, it destroys community. It destroys community. When people can't trust each other, when governments are known to lie, when media is known to distort the truth, when businesses regularly break contracts, when spouses are deceitful and deceiving, it always destroys community.
Trust is the social glue of a people and without it, everything falls apart. It destroys community. Number two, it disintegrates identity. It disintegrates identity. The only way we really know who we are is if there's something stable inside, something stable underneath who we are deep down. And when we go through life and we're one way with one group of people and we're another way with another group of people, when we're one way on Facebook or on social media or whatever, and we filter everything out there and then we're really a different person.
You know what I'm talking about? When we live in that kind of disintegration, we're always shifting and we're always sort of like a chameleon trying to fit into different groups and different social settings. We start to lose who we really are. We start to lose who we really are underneath. We confuse the mask with the identity behind it.
And disintegrated people disintegrate. It's a huge problem. The third thing is it desecrates others. It desecrates others. When I say I swear to you and then I go out and I break my oath, I'm exploiting, aren't I? It's coercive. It's manipulative. It's using other people for my ends and it is a desecration to the image of God in someone else. I am not treating the other person as a person made in the likeness and image of God to be cherished and upheld.
I'm trashing them. The fourth thing is it decimates credibility. We know this. When we lie even about little things, eventually it catches up to us, doesn't it? No one will believe what we say in the end.
We're the boy who cried wolf one too many times. And then the fifth thing is it's delusional thinking. It's delusional thinking. The more we tell lies and twist the truth and the more we begin to live in the alternative reality we've created for ourselves with our words, we become deluded. We lose the ability. People who are perpetual liars lose the ability to distinguish truth from error over time. It gets fuzzy and cloudy and you can literally start believing the lies that you've told yourself for so long and you can't even see reality.
It's a huge problem. And this is kind of where the Pharisees ended up. I swear by the temple, but not by the gold of the temple. I swore by the altar, but not by the sacrifice on the altar. I swore by the earth, not by heaven.
I'm off the hook. I technically didn't invoke the presence of God technically so I can break my vow. And Jesus is like, are you kidding me? What is wrong with you people?
How delusional can you get? God is everywhere. He sees all.
He knows all. It doesn't matter what you swear by. You can swear by heaven or earth or the temple or its gold or the altar or the sacrifice on the altar.
It doesn't matter. God is the creator and sustainer of the universe, of all things everywhere. The whole universe is God's.
He's everywhere, always present. You might think you've not invoked the presence of God in your vow, but there is nowhere you can go from the presence of God. Every promise, every vow, every sworn pledge is made in the presence of God.
There's nowhere you can hide from the presence of God. And Jesus says in Matthew 12 verse 36, I tell you that men will give an account in the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. Not the purposeful words that you've spoken, not the rehearsed words, the careless ones. The stuff you said off the cuff and you didn't.
All of it. Because it's coming from your heart. So Jesus says, let your yes be yes.
Let your no be no. Your righteousness must succeed that of the scribes and Pharisees. You must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect. This is the kind of new heart that you need that is at home in the kingdom of heaven. So here's my prescription. Dr. Jesus, what's your prescription? It's important to remember that Jesus is not laying down a new law here.
He's illustrating a new heart. When he says don't take an oath at all, let what you simply say be yes or no. His problem is not with oaths per se. Hear me clearly. The Bible is full of oaths and covenants and promises.
Yes. God routinely gives covenants and oaths and promises to his people. Jesus answers under oath when he's on trial. Paul takes a vow in Acts to God. The problem is not with oaths per se.
Jesus is not laying down a new law that we can never take oaths under any circumstances. He is illustrating the kind of heart that is available to us in the kingdom of heaven. The kind of heart that he is offering to us if we will come and follow him. It is the integrity of a childlike heart. It's the integrity of a childlike heart.
We keep coming back to this, friends. The difference between the heart of an orphan and the heart of a child. Heart of an orphan, heart of a child. There's two ways we can live in the universe. I can live as an orphan that I have to fend for myself.
That I'm all alone in the universe. I need to make sure my needs get met because no one's looking out for me except for me. And so if I have to use a vow in order to get ahead in life to make you believe me and so you end up doing what I want and I get what I need. If an oath helps me gain an edge or power over you so that I can get ahead in life, so be it.
And if I need to write in a little loophole so I can get out of my contract, get out, get ahead and if I can get away with that, I'm going to do it. Because I'm an orphan. I'm on my own. I'm fending for myself.
There's no God. I'm just going to do what I got to do to get through life. And I got to look out for number one, right?
Got to look out for number one. It's orphan language. Pharisees are just as much orphans by the way. They're not pursuing relationship with God. They're managing around God.
You see that? What are the rules? How do I have to just keep them off my back? Check the box so I can get on with what I want? How do I squirrel around? It's like the IRS.
It's like what exemptions can I take so I can keep as much of my money as I want? I stay in control. What does God need? Okay, fine.
I'll give it to you. There's no relationship here. This is an orphan working the system for its own advantage. But Jesus comes and gives us another way altogether.
Another heart. This is by the power of my spirit. In Jesus Christ, in me, I'm going to make you not an orphan, but a child of God. If you trust in me, I will give you the right to become children of God.
That's who you are. And you won't have to be on your own. You won't have to fend for yourself because you will have a Heavenly Father who is watching over you. He's caring for you. He's protecting you. He's providing for you.
And at every moment of every day, He is with you and He is for you and He is life to you. Which means you don't have to go manipulate with your words to get what you want from other people. You don't have to coerce other people, power over them to get what you want.
You don't have to create loopholes so you can make sure you're taken care of in the end. You can just simply say yes and mean it. You can say no and mean it because your Father is always with you. He's with you to give you resources and strength. He sees all.
He knows all. And He gives you His Holy Spirit to be with you at every moment of every day to teach you to walk in integrity and perfect wholeness just like your Father who is in heaven. See, Jesus is teaching us by the power of His Spirit to become the kind of people for whom yes means yes and no means no. That we learn to keep our promises with the integrity, the kind of integrity that is at home in the kingdom of heaven. We're learning to live like children of God. Friends, God is making you and me into the kind of people who don't need oaths to be believed. He's making us to become like Himself, people of integrity who say yes and mean it, who say no and follow through.
It's that simple. No more untrustworthy manipulation and exploitation. No more disintegrated coercive self-interest. No, this is the integrity of a childlike heart that is at home in the kingdom of heaven. Bottom line takeaway is Jesus offers to make you whole. Friends, Jesus offers to make us whole. And the first step to integrity is admitting that we don't have any.
It's counterintuitive, isn't it? The first step toward integrity is admitting that we don't have any. Jeremiah 17 verse 9, the Bible says the heart is deceitful above all things and abundantly wicked. Who can know it? We can't even figure out the mess that's inside our hearts, can we?
But you know who can? Verse 10. I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind. The first step toward integrity is confessing that we don't have any. Admitting honestly with God that we're a mess, that we're full of disintegration, duplicity, self-delusion, pretending and deceit.
That's our hearts. But there's good news, friends, for people like us who hunger and thirst for righteousness, who want to have a heart full of integrity that's right before God. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Because Jesus, friends, is the true integrity that we need, right? Jesus is the integrity that we need.
Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He is true through and through. He is whole. He is an integrated being.
He is righteousness at every level of his being. And the only one with the integrity of a childlike heart in the history of the universe, Jesus, do you realize he was disintegrated on the cross for you? He was disintegrated on the cross for you. He died in your place and for your sake, it's your substitute, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to God. He was fractured in order that we might be whole.
He was disintegrated that we might be integrated and brought home. And by grace through faith in Christ, the spirit of Jesus now lives in us and guides us into the way of Jesus and into the integrity of a childlike heart. This is something only God can do in us. We are children of God. If we have trusted in Jesus Christ, we are children of God by grace through faith in him now and forever.
Amen? And then Jesus is showing us the way by his word and by his spirit. He is transforming us so that the fragmented and disintegrated orphan hearts that we usually live with are coming together and being made whole again by the power of his spirit.
The spirit is conforming us to the image of Christ, to his likeness, cultivating the life and heart of God within us, transforming us ultimately into glory so that we might be like our Father who is in heaven, perfect in every way. So Jesus, friends, is our physician. He's our heart surgeon. He's looked at our symptoms, given us a diagnosis.
He's written as a prescription and his prescription is himself. I am the solution to your problems. I can give you a new heart. Come follow me and I will transform you into the kind of people who live with integrity from a whole heart so that your yes means yes and your no means no and your words are whole, just like your hearts in the kingdom of heaven. Friends, this is what Jesus alone can do for you and for me if we open our lives to him.
Would you pray with me? Father, we want to be whole. We pray that you would search us, know our hearts, see if there's any wicked way in us so that you might lead us in the way everlasting, the way of Jesus. Father, we invite your Holy Spirit to put his finger on the disintegrated parts of who we are.
The small everyday things we excuse and pretend are no big deal, but are symptomatic of hearts that are a mess, chock full of sin, unlike you. Father, would you by grace through faith in the power of your spirit make us more like Jesus, teach us to walk in your way, teach us to give you our hearts, teach us to be new. For Jesus' sake we pray. Amen.
Our enemies, instead of seeking retaliation, plan to join us. The Moody Church Hour is a listener supported ministry. We count on the ongoing financial support of listeners like you. Together we share solid biblical teaching that transforms lives across America and around the world. You can call us at 1-800-215-5001.
That's 1-800-215-5001. Online you'll find us at moodychurchhour.com. That's moodychurchhour.com. Or write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. This broadcast is a ministry of The Moody Church.
