972. Loving God with a Blameless Heart

Welcome to The Daily Platform. Our program features sermons from chapel services at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Every day, students are blessed by the preaching and teaching of the Bible from the University Chapel Platform. We're continuing a study series called Loving God. These messages were preached in a special seminary chapel for students preparing for ministry. Today's speaker is Dr. Mark Minnick, a seminary professor at Bob Jones University.

We're reading a portion of scripture that does not make use of the English word blameless, but it does make use of the Hebrew word that has reference to that and in other translations is rendered that way. Psalm 101. We're going to read the first four verses. I will sing of mercy and judgment unto thee, O Lord, will I sing. I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes.

I hate the work of them that turn aside. It shall not cleave to me. A froward heart shall depart from me.

I will not know a wicked person. One of the most famous seals in all of Christian history is that that was devised by the French reformer John Calvin. You probably have seen images of it. It consists of a single hand. And it is a human heart. And the Latin inscription around that image reads, My heart, O Lord, I offer to you promptly and sincerely. My heart, I offer to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely. Now, there's no mention of love in that motto, and there's no mention of love in this psalm, either the first four verses that we read together or the verses that follow it. The question is, when Calvin devised that seal and when he encircled it with that inscription, was there any love involved in that? And when this psalm speaks of what it does and says what it does about the psalmist's heart, is there any love involved in it? In the second verse, I will walk within my house with a perfect heart. And the word that is translated perfect there is translated in both the New American Standard Bible and the ESV, which probably many of you are looking at, with what word?

Not the word perfect, but what other word? Integrity is the word that shows up there. Is anyone looking at a translation where it is rendered blameless? What translation is that? The NIV renders it blameless.

Okay. This is the word that, when our Old Testament speaks of blamelessness, this is the word that typically, not always, but typically is used. And what's interesting about it is that that word's root occurs in this passage two other times. It occurs a second time in verse two, where it's also rendered perfect. In the King James, I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. Let's think for a moment, a blameless way. My behavior will be blameless. And in my house I'll walk with a blameless heart. And then it occurs again in the sixth verse, where again the psalmist speaks of those, in this case others, who walk in a blameless way.

Those are the people he says that he wants to have in his service as a king. What does it mean to love the Lord with a blameless heart, a perfect heart, a heart of integrity? That's what the question is that lies before us today. And we need to begin with both of those words, which are scripture words, and the pastor who used to have the church that I pastor would remind us from time to time that the Holy Spirit was not careless in his use of words. What do those words have reference to that we so casually reference and use?

What are we talking about? What is my heart? Very interesting when you look at studies that are done that have reference to the internal anatomy of our being. You've got terms like heart, soul, mind, spirit. Most people who study those terms come to the conclusion that there is such an overlap between them that in some cases they're used almost synonymously in scripture. And that tends to be the case because the scripture will attribute the same actions to two or more of those words that the soul will do the same kind of thing that a heart will do.

So there's this overlap. But I do want to draw a scriptural distinction this morning. The scripture says that we are souls. I am a soul. But I'm not a heart. My soul possesses a heart. And if you ask yourself, all right, what part of my soul is my heart? The Bible comes back and speaks of it in terms that allow us to say my heart is the center of my soul. Now it's not the center like the core of a baseball.

It's a center like this. If my soul were a river, my heart would be the what? It would be the spring. Or if my soul were a tree, my heart would be the seed. In other words, when the scripture speaks of my heart and my soul possessing a heart, it's talking about the center of me that actually permeates the whole.

And it permeates it determinatively. This is exactly the imagery that James uses when he asks these questions. Can a fountain send forth water that is both bitter and sweet? And the answer to that is what? No, because the fountain determines the whole course of the water, the character of it.

And he uses the other image that I used this morning when he says, can an olive tree produce figs? And the answer is no, that's not its genetic makeup. That's not in its DNA. The original seed determined everything when it comes to what permeates the whole. That's the way a heart is.

It permeates everything. That is why the scripture can say things like this. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. That's why the Lord can say it's out of the heart that perceive my thoughts and my deeds. That center permeates everything when it comes to thinking, doing, and talking. It even determines whether I believe with the heart man believes, Romans chapter 10 verse 10 says. So right there at the very center of my soul is this thing that Calvin was saying, Lord, I offer it to you, okay? Now what would it mean to offer it up as blameless in its character?

In other words, not bitter, but sweet. What does that mean? Well, we need to spend just a moment talking about the word blameless then. Even though those English words, blameless, blame, without blame, those terms don't occur very often in our Bibles. In fact, in the King James Bible, the word blameless only occurs three times in all the Old Testament. In the New American Standard Bible, it occurs over 30 times, but still not very many times.

And because you don't see that English terminology very often, what's invisible to us is that actually the Hebrew root form and the variations it takes occurs many, many, many times, over 200. But translated in various ways so you're not aware that what you're actually seeing is this concept, blameless, and you're seeing it many times in many places and not aware of it. What does blameless mean as the Holy Spirit uses it in the Old Testament? Well, if we were talking about a construction project, it means all the parts are there. But it doesn't just mean that they're lying loose on the ground, like when the flatbed trucks first deliver them. It means that all of the parts have been assembled and the project is complete. But if we're not talking about a construction project, if we're talking, for instance, about a sacrificial animal, then it means there's no defect in it.

It is blameless. Or if we're talking about a body, it means it's without sickness or wounds. And what that really brings us to is this understanding, and I think this pretty much holds up. Maybe there's an exception here or there, but I think in general this holds up, folks, that what the Holy Spirit is drawing our attention to by the use of this term repeatedly throughout the Old Testament is that blamelessness has both a qualitative and a quantitative aspect.

Quantitatively, everything is there. At the very center of my being, my heart, I offer to you, O Lord, promptly and sincerely, all the parts are there. Everything that determines the way my mouth speaks, the actions that I do, the thoughts that come out of my heart, even it's all there. And Lord, qualitatively, I'm going to use this word morally, when it comes to moral character, it's not defective. Now, let's move from that, those concepts, to really fleshing that out. What does it mean for me in the ministry to love the Lord that way with the very center of my soul, everything is there, and there are no blemishes in it?

What actually does that mean? Well, scripturally, it means, first of all, something that is noted here in various ways in the 101st Psalm that we looked at. Would you look at the fourth verse, and the word heart also occurs there. But in this case, that heart is not blameless. It's not complete. It's not whole.

It's not unblemished. The King James word speaks of this heart being throw word. When's the last time you used that in conversation, or it showed up on your Facebook page?

Probably not very often. What does that word mean? It means twisted. It means crooked. And what is very interesting to me about this is that in the book of Proverbs, this is the contrast that most often is used as the opposite of a blamelessness. Crookedness. Twistedness. So folks, what does it mean as a minister, a person serving the Lord in an office, as an elder, pastor, or seminary teacher on the mission field, what does it mean to love the Lord with a blameless heart?

Certainly it means this. It means that I'm a man in the ministry who is not crooked inside. I'm not twisted inside. The opposite of that would be that I'm not crooked, I'm what?

I am straight. You ever known anybody like that? You ever known anybody and their yes is yes.

And their no is no. And you don't mistrust their motives. They've had such a track record with you in ministry that when they get up and launch a building program, or they say we're going to have a different emphasis in Sunday school next year, or we're changing translations, you've known them well enough and long enough to know there's not an ulterior what? There's not an ulterior motive here. They are not devious.

They're straight. That's what it's talking about. And of course, folks, the tremendous necessity of that is that in ministry we don't represent ourselves. We stand in God's place when we speak to these people and lead them. That's what it would mean to truly love the Lord as a minister, to love him with a blameless heart in my ministry. I'm not crooked inside. And as a result of that, the things I say aren't crooked, the things I do aren't crooked.

What comes out of my mouth is actually what I think in my heart and what I think in my heart is blameless. But the other thing that that means is what David prays for in the 86th Psalm, and I'd like to ask you to turn there with me, if you will. Psalm 86. In the 11th verse, David prays that the Lord would teach him his own divine ways. And David makes this commitment in the middle of verse 11.

This Psalm 86, verse 11. Teach me thy way, O Lord. Now here's the commitment, and I'll walk in it. I will walk in thy truth. But this is what it's going to take to do that. You can't just get up one morning, throw the shades open and say, I'm just going to change the whole course of things on my own. Can't do that. David resorts to petition, unite my heart to fear thy name.

Unite it. Folks, remember what blameless has reference to in the Scripture. There's not just a qualitative emphasis. For instance, it's straight and true, not crooked and wicked. There's not just the qualitative emphasis, but there's the other side of it, like a building project. There's what kind of emphasis?

It's a quantitative emphasis. David is aware of that when he prays, Lord, take all the separate parts, all of the wanderings of the various components that are inside the center of my soul, and please bring them all together. That would be completeness.

Unite my heart that way. And what does that mean in ministry? Well, it means that the entirety of our being inside is committed to the Lord's calling upon our lives and what we're doing. That we really are people who finally, by God's grace, over a process of years, and again, this is a hard thing to just make a once for all decision about, and just from that day on, the battle's won.

It won't be that way. This battle is fought many, many times, day after day sometimes. But this matter of actually being whole inside in the sense that there is not a part of that center of my being, whether it be my affections or my mind or the decisions I make, that there's not the kind of distraction that has really disjointed and fragmented me inside so that it couldn't be said of me that with his whole heart he enters in to what God has called him to do. This is one of the great things that God was concerned about with the kings of Israel. I want to give you another reference that has really struck me about this. It's Deuteronomy 17, 17, and this is God looking ahead to the day when he would give a king to Israel. And God commanded that the king should not multiply two things in this particular verse. Previous verse even mentions horses. But Deuteronomy 17, 17, he's not to multiply wives and he's not to multiply silver and gold because God says this will turn his heart away.

And what it's talking about is getting a portion of his heart. If you were to ask yourself what are the current gods for the younger generation, this is the answer that comes back in the polls. Social media, computer games, that's number two, and sports. And what's interesting about all three of those is they are all matters that are morally indifferent.

In other words, they're all lawful. But when it comes to the things that people cannot live without, things that become determinative of the decisions they make about their time and resources, these are the touchstones. And their decisions are made in light of freeing up more time and having the energy for. And these are the things that they would say are their passions. That's the word that is used so loosely. And folks, I just want to ask us this morning as people who are getting ready for the most glorious and really the most responsible task in the world, compared to what you are going to do with a group of people no matter how small, the things that appear in the headlines on the sports page are as nothing.

I like sports, played sports in high school. But a guy running up and down a field with white stripes carrying a little piece of pigskin under his arm, compared to what you are going to do with the raw material of people's lives and what you do is going to have eternal consequence to it? What a necessity there is for us to plead with the Lord to unite our hearts, so that when it comes to our passion and what really determines how we spend our time, that it is our love for the Lord that we can truly say is our delight. One of the old Puritans, Thomas Adam, used to say, what we need to do is use the world but delight in God. Our difficulty is we use God and delight in the world. Somebody else said the way you put it is that we play at our work and we work at our play.

And that is a fragmented heart. And dear folks, I would like to give you something that may prove to be a very accurate measurement about this very matter that I'm talking about. And that is something that in my estimation the Bible does not come and demand of me as it did in the Old Testament. It doesn't legislate it for me. And maybe this really is God's way of making it a supreme test, the fact that he doesn't legislate it. But that is what I look forward to and the way I use the Lord's Day every week. And it is called the Lord's Day. There's only one other place in the New Testament where that form, kuria kas, belonging to the Lord is the form.

There's only one other place in all the New Testament that occurs, 1 Corinthians 11, the Lord's table. I eat every day. I give thanks to the Lord every day. It's God who provides my food every day. All my meals came from the Lord.

But there is a meal that in a significant way and in a completely distinctive way is the Lord's peculiar possession. That same word is used of the first day of the week. I had to glorify the Lord every day.

I live for the Lord every day. But the New Testament itself singles that day out. And when it came to what was legislated in the Old Testament, the Sabbath, God challenged his people this way in Isaiah 58. If you would turn your foot from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath, do you know this verse?

Call the Sabbath a what? A delight. If you would do that not doing your own ways nor finding your own pleasure, then, now listen to this, then you will take delight not in the day.

Do you know what it says? You will be taking delight in the Lord. Now, you know, it's one thing for God to legislate that Calvin take his heart and hand it over.

It's another thing to do this out of the sheer love that is a delight. And in the Old Testament where you have that day legislated, God still says, it isn't that I want you to do this legalistically. I want you to find out where your delight is.

And in the New Testament, there's no legislation at all. I mean, what that actually does is that ups the ante. Now we're really going to find out where your delight is. And folks, this is not a side application. I'm a minister. The first day of the week, the Lord's day is my major business day. It will be yours by the grace of God. Where's your heart that day?

And if your heart isn't 100% unscattered, but complete and unblemished in your commitment to the glory of the Lord and the things he gave you to do, I don't know. What about the other six days? What about the days that aren't called the Lord's day?

It really is. It is a very interesting and probably an extremely appropriate test of where our hearts really are in the face of a culture whose major gods and passions are what the Poles have come back with. Well, this will be tested, folks, again and again and again. And that's why we're going to find ourselves in David's position of constantly having to pray that the Lord would unite our hearts. Let's bow for prayer. Loving Father, grant to us, we ask, an understanding spirit and give to us truly a desire that we may grow in this grace and that we may do it out of our love for you. We pray in Christ's precious name. Amen. You've been listening to a message preached at Bob Jones University by seminary professor Dr. Mark Minnick, which was part of the series Loving God. Join us again tomorrow as we continue this series on The Daily Platform.