Peace Hill Podcasts
Proverbs 20:5-12 - Exposing the Depths of our Hearts
5 The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters,
but a man of understanding draws them out.
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| 6 Many a man claims to have unfailing love,
| but a faithful man who can find?
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| 7 The righteous man leads a blameless life;
| blessed are his children after him.
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| | 8 When a king sits on his throne to judge,
| | he winnows out all evil with his eyes.
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| |9 Who can say, "I have kept my heart pure;
| I am clean and without sin"?
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| 10 Differing weights and differing measures—
| the LORD detests them both.
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11 Even a child is known by his actions,
by whether his conduct is pure and right.
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12 Ears that hear and eyes that see—
the LORD has made them both.
Understand Your Own Heart.
Our Hearts are Deep Waters: Vs.5 & 11 both refer to knowing the heart. The purposes or motivations of the heart are deep waters. That’s a good image - it means that the purposes of our hearts are obscured beneath murky-dark waters - like the dark green pond in my garden. There’s a sucker fish in the pond which I have never seen because he stays on the bottom of the pond. Verse 5 is saying that a lot of the reasons for the things we do - a lot of our motivations that drive us - are like that fish. He’s there feeding, on the bottom of the pond - but you won’t see him unless you draw him out.
A person of understanding is going to draw these motives of the heart out and look at them. How? Vs. 11 helps explain - “Even a child is known by his actions”.
You can’t sit down with your 3-year old and discuss motives. The most useless question you can ask a 3-year old is, “Why did you do that?” They don’t know! But when you say to the 3-year old, “Don’t touch the light socket”, and he looks at you, and wanders over and waits until you look busy, and then reaches for the socket - you suddenly know something about your 3-year olds heart.
We would like to believe that we are a lot more complex and sophisticated than 3-year olds - but the truth is, we work about the same.
If we look at our actions and ask, “Why did I do that?” or, “What did I get out of doing that?” or What is going on my my heart when I do that?” - we can begin (perhaps with the help of a counselor in some cases), to draw out our motives and see what is going on in our hearts.
Confront What is Buried in Your Heart.
We Want to Be Blameless: “The righteous man leads a blameless life...” This is what I would like to find when I look at my life - in my heart - blamelessness - what a loaded word. To be blameless means that nobody can look at you or at me and say, “You did wrong” “This situation - this mess - this problem - this grievance - is your fault.” If we are talking about motivations of the heart - here is one - the desire to be blameless. Unfortunately, there is blame in each of our lives - their is fault - we have been and done wrong.
Our tendency is to deny every accusation - to claim to be blameless - a tendency that causes us to hide the motives of our hearts. We deny our motives - we change the story when we are accused so that we come out looking like innocent victims with great motives. We want to be - or at least appear - blameless, but there are two big problems...
1) We are Not Faithful: “Many a man claims to have unfailing love, but a faithful man who can find?” I want to love God - I want to have unfailing love. We sing about this - (this is my desire... give me one pure and holy passion), but our hearts are not constant.
One of the frustrating things that happens in the church is that many people claim unfailing love - they claim that they have a constant walk with Jesus that never flags - as though they walk above the trials and struggles of a fallen world and the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.
Who is faithful? Who can say that the motives of their hearts are only love for the Lord? Who can say they have loved the Lord with all their heart, mind, soul and strength?
If we are ever going to penetrate the fog and murkiness around what is going on in our hearts, we have to confess that our love is not constant - “We have not loved you as we ought, nor cared that we were loved by thee...” . To claim that our love for God is constant and that we are without sin is pharisaical.
2) We are Not Pure: “Who can say, I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin?” Who can say that they have been without sin? “If we say that we are without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” We are to blame for sin. We have broken not only God’s Law but our own standards - we have sinned against God and against one another.
Unless we are willing to confess that these things are true of us, we are always deceiving ourselves - never coming to a true knowledge of our own heart - never truly confronting sin.
Expose Your Heart to Christ.
Expose Your Sin Before the King: “When a king sits on his throne to judge, he winnows out all evil with his eyes”. Here is another great image. In its OT context this verse implies that God (the king) winnows - separates good from evil - people. But in its NT context, the implication is that Christ winnows out the evil that is in our hearts.
Winnowing is throwing the wheat in the air so that the chaff dust - the trash that is not wheat - blows away - and only the good wheat is left. This is a picture of what Christ does in our hearts as we confess and expose our sin to him. This picture is so good because sin is a matter of sinful desire and motive woven into good desire and motive. As we confess and expose our sin, Christ not only forgives us, but he begins the process of separating out the good from the evil - giving us grace to leave behind the evil and to turn the good motives towards honoring him. This is the process of sanctification.
Be Honest: “Differing weights and differing measures — the LORD detests them both”.
In this final image, the writer confronts our temptation to be dishonest in our confession. DIffering weights and measures are a picture of dishonesty - the merchant who used one weight to weigh out the amount of gold others owed him and a lighter weight to weigh out the amount of gold he owed them.
This pictures the way we tend to look at our own sinful desires and motives as being less offensive than that of others. We give more weight to the sins of others than to our own, and by this understanding we excuse ourselves.
The Lord detests dishonesty because by excusing or downplaying our sin we block the work of sanctification - turn ourselves into liars - and prevent ourselves from ever grasping the grace of the Gospel of Jesus.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
The purposes of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.
Proverbs .20:5
