What We Get Wrong about Needing a Soft Heart | Stay Close

Thank you so much.

Grace, grace, grace, grace, grace.

God is the one he commands us to be holy.

That's what we were just singing about.

And yet, do you know that God is also the one that when you end up not being holy for a day or a moment or a month, he's the one that says, Bring me your sin card, bring me the tally.

And he rips it up.

He's the one who calls us to be holy, but then he's also the one who's making us holy.

And he's the one who's not holding sin against us when we just come to him in simple childlike faith and obedience.

Every weekend, I'm a little bit nervous that someone's gonna come in here and they're gonna hear law.

They're gonna hear, like, you need to obey all the rules and get this right.

So if that is you, I'm I'm sorry, that's how you've understood it.

That's not how it is at all.

Okay.

There is a law that God commands us, these are the good, these are the right, these are the things we we are supposed to do, but each and every one of us has fallen and we'll never be able to fulfill the law on our own.

That's why there's Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ comes and says, I know that you didn't fulfill all the rules you were supposed to.

You didn't you weren't always a good person.

And I'm the one who takes the punishment for that on the cross.

And he just gives you the gift of his obedience.

Absolutely 100% for free.

You don't have to do the right church things, you don't have to go to the right places, you don't have to know the right people, nothing.

All you have to do is say, Jesus, I trust you.

That's it.

That's the whole gospel right there.

Then the whole church thing is about growing up in that, learning how to do it more and more effectively and more and more on fire and in love with Jesus.

That's what the whole thing's about.

So if that's ever been unclear, there you go.

Hopefully that's a little bit clearer.

Years ago, I was going with a buddy into breakfast.

We're meeting up at this restaurant, and I had just gotten a delicious Starbucks mocha latte.

And I was really excited about it.

And I said, you know what?

I'm gonna bring this into the restaurant.

And I like it so much.

And he paused and just said, Are you sure you should do that?

And I had a lot of sass going on that day.

And I was like, I think I should.

Yeah, let's find out.

Let's find out if that's okay.

And so I brought it in, sit down to the table.

We're sitting there.

And once you know it, not 20 minutes in, one of the owners comes up to me and said, What are you doing with that?

What are you doing with that here?

I was like, Well, hey man, I'm here.

I'm I'm I'm gonna buy your food.

I figure I can have the kind of coffee that I want to.

It wasn't my best pastor day, I'll tell you that.

And so we got a little bit in, and she was very gracious, honestly, with me, but it was such a negative experience.

I've never been back to that place.

You believe that?

Like in all this time, I've never been back.

My heart, you could say, my heart hardened because of that experience to a diner.

You know, that's of little consequence.

There's a lot of diners.

I've been to many, many diners since then.

Um, just so you know, like I wasn't, I wasn't like even early 20s.

I was 30 years old when this was happening.

Okay, so this was this is just this was just sass turned up too too loud.

That's what it was.

But it it doesn't it doesn't affect really my heart toward diners for the rest of my life.

But every one of us, you've had an experience where your heart hardened up and maybe did not get soft again.

I want to talk to you today about the wisdom and the importance of keeping a soft heart because it's really, really hard.

Bible says in Proverbs 4:23, guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.

Proverbs 4:23

From it flows the springs of life, it affects everything you do.

Your heart makes things happen in terms of who you are or not happen in terms of who you are.

You know this.

If you are just used to thinking negative things and you don't take control of that and stop thinking negative things all the time, you're just gonna become you're gonna be your soul's gonna be dyed the color of negative.

That's what's gonna happen.

If you don't, if you don't take control of that thing, if you just allow yourself, you give yourself to anger and you keep thinking angry thoughts and more and more angry everywhere, you're gonna become an angry dude or do that.

You're just gonna be an angry person, and and you're not even gonna control it after a while.

We need to guard our hearts because we're just not always sensitive.

Sometimes we just allow any old thing in our hearts, we just allow any old junk in our hearts.

We're not concerned about our attitude, we're not watching that enough, we're not watching our motivation enough, and it's affecting who we are, and it affects all of life.

So here's your bottom line for today a soft heart keeps trusting Jesus when life gives it reasons not to.

A soft heart keeps trusting Jesus when life gives it reasons not to.

You might have your heart be hardening if you've said recently, I don't know what to expect from God anymore.

I just don't know.

I don't know if he's gonna come through or not.

Even if you believe in God, there there might be some little hardness of like, I don't know though.

You know, he he didn't show up the way I thought he was going to last time.

Maybe you did pray, but you were still disappointed.

Maybe you were trying to save the marriage and it didn't work.

Maybe everyone else seems to be pulling ahead in terms of their life and in terms of their career and in terms of how much money they have, and you just keep not doing that.

And you're like, what is the problem?

Like I'm praying and God's supposed to help me out, isn't he?

Maybe you're one of the ones that no matter what you do, you feel overlooked.

You feel like God has hidden you away somewhere.

Like even though you're right there, you're hidden.

Nobody can see you.

And it's almost like God is not only not helping you out of that, he's kind of doing it.

We don't have to distrust God entirely to just say, I don't know if I can expect much from God anymore.

I don't know that that's realistic.

The problem is that has consequences.

That has consequences in loss of joy and in loss of rest.

A settled state of heart.

We've been in this series called Stay Close.

It's on the book of Hebrews and the awesome Jesus that is inside of it.

It's going to speak a lot to us regarding the Old Testament, how Jesus fulfills so much about what was done and foretold there.

But for past several weeks, we've been in Hebrews 1 and 2.

And really what's happening there is the writer, the author, the pastor that's writing this sermon in this letter, he's just celebrating how awesome Jesus is.

Like this is all that he's done, and this is all that he is.

And by the way, here's all the advantages that he brings to your life.

And then he gets to chapter three and he rounds a corner of sorts.

And he says, Jesus has been faithful to you.

He's been faithful to you.

Now your job is to do your doggone best to be faithful back.

Like be faithful back.

You think about the disciples in the garden.

Jesus asks them, Can you just can you pray an hour with me?

And and they're not trying to be mean, they're not trying to be bad.

They just, no, they can't even pray an hour.

Like they just doze off.

They're unfaithful to Jesus.

And you know, you and I are unfaithful to Jesus.

We can't, we really can't go a day.

We really can't go an hour.

Not, it's not that we're trying to do bad, but there's something somewhere in our awareness that knows that's not the way of Jesus, but we still go that way.

And we are unfaithful.

And that's why I praise God, we got the gospel.

That's why we talked about it right up front.

But even so, he asks us to be faithful.

Hebrews 3, chapter chapter 3, verse 1.

And so, dear brothers and sisters who belong to God and are partners with those called to heaven, think carefully about this Jesus, whom we declare to be God's messenger and high priest.

For he was faithful to God who appointed him, just as Moses served faithfully when he was entrusted with God's entire house.

He compares Moses because these people are very familiar with Moses.

They think Moses is like it, man.

He says, you know, Moses, he was awesome for who he was.

But even Moses was only a servant.

Jesus is the architect himself.

Jesus is the one who's over the whole thing.

Moses was Jesus' servant.

Jesus is a big deal.

And Jesus raised the bar in terms of what faithfulness looks like.

And so as you trust him and as you do life with him as your companion, don't forget to like try to be faithful and try to follow him.

And then he gives this cautionary tale and this that's gonna go throughout the entire book of Hebrews.

He starts to talk about the old times.

He starts to talk about the ancient Israelites that were coming out of Egypt.

And it's really a 40-year process that he's gonna be referring to, but there's specific times also where they're on the edge of the promised land and they're about to go in.

But some of the ones that went in first come back and be like, Don't go in there, man.

They're gonna kill us.

And so they're like, oh my gosh, they're gonna kill us.

And they start and start talking about it, and they kind of poison the entire community.

And they're like, let's get out of here, let's go back, doing the exact opposite of what God had called and asked them to do.

And so here's the problem we're gonna see in the book of Hebrews that the pastor's warning us about.

These people were the people of God.

These people had seen God do incredible things.

Yes, they did.

These were the people that, like, I saw his power, I saw him bring us out of Egypt, I saw him bring us through the Red Sea, I've seen him provide for us again and again and again.

And yet there was something going on with them, and there's a lesson in it for us, and it's this you can be around the people of God and still grow distant from God in your heart.

You can be around here, you can be around all the latest podcasts, you can be around all the religious paraphernalia and still be growing distant in your heart from God.

So we skip down to verse seven.

That is why the Holy Spirit says, Today, when you hear his voice.

Now, this is pretty trippy, dude.

Watch this.

He's quoting Psalm 95, but he's saying the Holy Spirit is speaking through that psalm to all of us right now.

So he's pointing to a scripture that teaches that the Holy Spirit of Jesus speaks through scripture.

Yeah, I just want to point that out because it's dope and you might have missed it.

Don't harden your hearts as Israel did when they rebelled, when they tested me.

God's like I was being tested in the wilderness.

There, your ancestors tested and tried my patience, even though they saw my miracles for 40 years.

So I was angry with them.

And I said, Their hearts always turn away from me.

They refuse to do what I tell them.

So in my anger, I took an oath.

They will never enter my place of rest.

This is when the Lord said, Fine, okay, y'all are gonna die and your kids are gonna go in because you didn't trust me.

You've seen me do all this stuff.

You can just have, you can have what you want.

You don't get the promised land and your kids are gonna get it.

And they all died off.

And their kids did go in.

But the warning is to us that says this be careful then, brothers and sisters.

Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God.

Notice several things there, okay?

He's putting this all together in one big heart set.

It's evil and it's unbelieving and it's disobedient, and it never does what the heart of God wants.

And what it does is it turns them away from God.

They begin to drift.

They're not staying close, they're drifting from God.

And we need to hear this in our time right now.

Even if you've been a Christian your whole life, hear the whisper of the Holy Spirit say, be careful.

Don't let your heart get hard because there's consequences to a hard heart, and one of them is you're going to drift away.

And that's very bad.

That's totally not in your best interest.

That's in your worst interest.

How do we get a hardened heart?

Well, this is why it's so deceptive.

It doesn't happen all at once.

It's slowly.

We slowly start to disbelieve.

I don't think God's gonna do that, or I don't think God's gonna do that.

And that unbelief begins to grow.

We slowly give ourselves to sin, and the deceitfulness of sin begins to brainwash us.

We'll talk about that in just a couple minutes.

And we're drifting farther and farther.

We're no longer sensitive to conviction.

We're no longer sensitive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and we're getting further and further away.

And sometimes it's because we're trusting in our own understanding, we're trusting in our own interpretation of events.

We're not asking for God's perspective, or even if we are, we're not doing anything about it.

We're still just working our own plan and doing the thing that we wanted to do anyway.

And so the pastor comes along in the book of Hebrews and says, This is very important.

Be careful.

Because there's a curse that the Lord put on the first generation.

He said, They will never enter my place of rest.

They will never enter my place of rest.

Now, rest is a layered topic in the scripture, okay?

So on one level, the rest was the promised land.

Like that's literally what it was.

Moses was supposed to lead them to rest.

They're not slaves anymore.

They're free, they're in their own land, they're in the promised land.

Moses couldn't quite do it.

We still give them props for getting them there.

But Joshua did do it.

He led them into the physical land of rest that was the promised land.

There's also the best version of rest, and this is for Christians, we get the rest that is in Jesus Christ.

We get the rest from our works.

Okay, so we don't have to keep God happy.

God is already happy.

I get to rest not in what I'm doing right, but in what Jesus did right for me.

That is the perfect and awesome rest.

And I get to rest in his faithful arms forever, including when I'm on heaven or in on earth and when I'm in heaven.

That is the best rest.

It's the rest from works.

And then heaven, of course, that's what you get as a result.

And that is a rest from the toil of work.

Work is cursed on this planet.

In heaven, it's not cursed.

It's not hard.

Can you imagine work not being hard?

It's just purposeful, just awesome, just joyous, just fun.

But there's also a different kind of rest that Jesus talks about in Matthew 11, 28.

Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

And this is rest of soul.

And here's some things I wrote down about it.

It's a release of self-assertion.

It's where I stop acting like, but also stop thinking like everything depends on me.

I can rest.

I stop anxiously striving to control all these outcomes.

I'm resting in Jesus, the Messiah, because I know he's got it in his hands.

I trust that God will provide what I need.

And if I don't have something right now, God must think I don't need it.

We're a little bit in an argument about that, but I will trust that he is right.

Now here's where it is, though.

It's not just like going and hide in the closet, it's letting go of control while still holding on to faithfulness.

So what are we learning?

Being around the things of God is not enough.

We need to actively keep trusting God all the way to the heavenly promised land, lest our heart drift away and be hardened by sin's deceitfulness.

A soft heart keeps trusting Jesus even when life gives it reasons not to.

What hardens a soft heart?

Here we go, number one.

An unbelieving heart.

This is where this unbelieving heart.

I don't know, man.

I don't really expect God to move.

It's not that I'm doubting God's existence.

I just don't expect He's He's taught me that He's not going to help me in these kinds of situations.

And so we let negativity begin to bleed into us.

We look at life and say, I've got challenges coming.

And instead, maybe, maybe at first I was leaning into challenges with faith.

It was like, oh, I bet you God can do something.

But then I was disappointed enough.

And now, as challenges come on the waves toward my shore, I look at them now a little bit more with suspicion.

I don't know what we're gonna do about that.

That is that is reason to skied addle and get back to Egypt.

Let's leave this whole promised land idea.

Let's go back to where it's safe and easier.

And we can begin to predict something about God's personality.

So some of you might know about this.

I I learned about it when I became a salesman, but before I was a salesman, I had a little bit of a prejudice.

I wish I didn't, but I did.

I'd walk into a place where there's a salesperson, and something inside him was like, they're trying to rip me off.

I was just like, they're, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna choose me, they're gonna do some kind of a deal where they like, yeah, you know, they're kind of like evil inside.

Super stupid, but it it was it was impulsive almost.

I just that's what I thought until I was a salesperson.

And then I learned, I mean, those people are real, but there's a lot of really great folks that just want to help.

Like they really just want to help you get to the best win.

They're not just after your money, like they're really sweet, they're really good at what they do, they can help you better than you can help yourself.

But that prejudice that I had against salespeople, that's a little bit what we can do to God.

I'll tell you what, don't even tell me about God moving, okay?

Because I'm I'm predicting now that he won't.

He's got his own motives that aren't about helping me.

He's not gonna get in my stuff.

Here's the answer though, Romans 15, 13.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him.

Let's do that again.

May the God of hope fill you, that's you and me, with all joy and peace.

How do I get joy and peace?

As you trust in him.

Again, I'm not returning to my circumstances to try to arrange them all the right way or get all the right answers, so then I'll feel good about it and feel peace and safety then.

No, but it's as I trust him, when I just let it go, and I say, I'm believing God.

It's not that I'm I'm starting to believe in God, it's no, I'm actively believing God to be working for my good right now, even if it doesn't look good right now.

And I gotta tell you, man, like you can go through seasons where this is exactly what you need.

It's and it's all that's gonna get you through.

Kenzie and I went through entire stages of life where it's like, well, still no money.

I'm believing God.

Beth Moore did this study on believing God once, and she had this little maybe you want to join me in doing it.

It's a little helper.

I'm believing God.

Put my mind on God.

I in my heart am believing God.

So I was believing God for finances.

We were believing God for having enough food in the house.

We were believing God for while this work still horrible, still not what I want to do.

I'm believing God that you're gonna somehow not only get me out of it, but work this together for good.

My wife um is sometimes tortured by the refrigerator, so she'll open it up.

And there's there's like kind of no drawers in it anymore.

So like we have pseudo shelves.

So we there's just it's like a it's like a Jenga Carter stack party in the fridge because you're people just stacking stuff all kinds of ways.

And so the lettuce will jump out at her.

And you know, time has gone by and we still don't have a new fridge, and we didn't get any new shelves because you know, we got kids in college, there's a lot of things to spend money on, man.

And so I look at my wife get attacked by the lettuce, and all I can say is, I'm believing God.

I'm believing God.

Someday we're gonna get new shelves for this refrigerator.

God's come through with all this stuff, I'm sure he can handle the refrigerator.

Yeah.

But you know, that's that's how it's gotta roll sometimes.

Now, here's a harder one because not all of them are as silly as the refrigerator.

Some of you know that I had a really good friend that passed away two years ago.

He was an elder of this church.

He he was around when we were still starting on the adventure of starting a church.

And he was one of the guys that believed in us when there was only five of us who believed it in the world.

And he was really good at when I would feel some kind of antagonism or when I would feel discouraged or not know what to do.

He had just the right amount of don't be an idiot, but God's still with you.

He had that kind of voice in my life.

And so there's been multiple times over the past two years where I've just been like, wow, I could really use Jake right now.

Like he would have he'd he'd be who I need him to be in this moment.

And so there can be a question him going home when he went, before we were old men together, and that really put a damper on my plans.

That really makes my life a little bit harder.

And in those moments when it's the hard things, that's when it's hardest to say, but I'm believing God that someday Jake and I are gonna be sitting somewhere in heaven and we're gonna be talking about the goodness of God and how wise he was to bring Jake home then instead of later.

I don't know how why, but what I can do is I can actively believe God that that was a good thing for some somehow.

It's definitely good for Jake, but it I I don't see how it's good for me, but I will see it then.

Dude, when I was really sick, this was it.

This is the only way through.

Like there's no there's no explanation, there's no way I'm gonna get better.

I'm just getting worse and worse every year.

I'm believing God.

That's that's all you can do.

Well, what if God doesn't come through?

Dude, at least you'll be a happy person.

You know what I'm saying?

If that's not his plan for you, if he's got some other plan, who cares?

You'll your your faith will still be active and your heart will still be soft.

This is why it's so important when you're going through some of these moments to stay in God's word.

See, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.

My faith is bolstered when I get into God's word.

So When everything's coming at you and it's like, I don't know, I can't even deal with God right now.

No, baby, you get in the word right then.

That's when you need it most.

That's when your heart's gonna get soft and flexible and learnable.

And sometimes, dude, you just gotta have a so I'm I just want to give you permission.

If you don't know this is a thing, there's gonna be times when life is just so hard, dude.

You just get impressed so much.

And you want to go out and do something, you know, evil or or what have you.

And the thing to do, you just go to God and you get on your face and you say, I don't even know what to do right now.

Yeah, I just need you.

I'm gonna like implode if you don't get in this thing with me right now.

And it's in those moments, you know what he does?

He gets in.

That's right.

And you begin to learn over time, you begin to learn God's faithfulness.

That he's yeah, you're gonna go through hard stuff, but he's also gonna be there so you can believe God while it's happening.

I've got this little note that kind of is in my Bible study system that pops up a couple times a year.

And it's just this list of here's like 25 things now since the late 90s where God has totally come through.

And it was, it was, it's not like little stuff.

It's like this is a major issue in my life.

This is a trial, this is bad, it's not short.

But as I look back, I'm like, oh yeah, God did that.

And God did that, and God did that.

Let me commend to you that even if you don't journal or anything, just making the list and pulling it out from time to time, because I forget things that he did at all, but there it is, and it reminds me, it tells me, hey, dude, your God was faithful then, he's gonna be faithful now.

That's right.

You don't even remember that thing until you just saw it.

That's the same way with this trial.

There's gonna be probably a time you don't even remember it.

So let his faithfulness reshape your future expectation.

So an unbelieving heart.

And then proximity without personal relationship.

Proximity without personal relationship.

There's not necessarily, even though you've got a lot of activity, in some sense, if we're outsourcing a real heart close to God, we're just gonna get cold, yo.

So many of you are familiar, even if you're not an HBEC person, with a pilot light.

You know what a pilot light is?

Right?

Like that's that would be in your furnace, and it might be in your stove, but it's the place where that pilot light is gonna light everything else up.

It's gonna keep you warm.

So as the winter months are rolling on, you want to make sure that pilot light stays lit so the furnace works.

Now, if you were to do life without a pilot light, you'd be fine until it start started to go toward winter.

Then you'd be cold.

Then you'd be looking at your neighbor across the way, and they'd be with their spouse, and they'd be nice and cozy and warm, and you'd be like, oh and they'd wave to you.

Hey, sure is nice to have a furnace working.

Because someone else's pilot light doesn't matter if we don't have a pilot light.

Jesus is the pilot light, Jesus is where all the fire comes from.

Okay?

So so, in other words, there's exterior stuff.

Even this sermon is an exterior thing.

Hopefully, you're feeling your pilot light because of it, but it's still an exterior thing.

The podcast, the book you're reading, it's all exterior stuff.

What we need is God use that exterior stuff to keep that fire on, to keep it going.

Let's think about it another way.

You know what it's like probably when you get some warm clothes fresh out of the dryer.

Like, whoa, that's good.

That feels good, right?

And it it begins to warm you up.

You're taking the heat from some other source and you're putting it on, you're getting warm.

But you know, if you can't stay warm on your own, that's a sign of unhealth.

Like even whether you have the the stuff, the cold clothes or not, if you if you can't stay warm on the inside, something's wrong with the pilot light.

And for some of us, it's like an empty fireplace.

The wind's just blowing through.

There's it's nice to be around folks, but you don't have your own.

And so we gotta get our own, baby.

We gotta get our own.

Sometimes we want to embrace a less demanding work uh version of life with Jesus.

We just want to, I'll dude, I'll just go.

Like I'll show up, but we're not.

I do this sometimes with family reunions.

I gotta tell myself.

Um, guys, for the most part, I don't want to go to family reunions.

I go because I should go.

That's why I go.

Like it is it is exterior.

I love the people, but I don't want to be with them.

Sorry.

I don't want to go without it with individuals, maybe out for coffee or something like that.

But I don't want to just, hey, yep, great.

What are you doing?

Like that's it, just becomes exterior to me.

And I but I want this.

That's what we need with Jesus.

Don't don't just go because you should.

Some come to church.

Well, I just should, I should give God an hour a week.

I just should go.

No, no, no, don't don't should go.

Light that pilot again.

And that comes from asking Jesus to light it.

That's we say, Lord, show me where I'm going through the motions.

This is extremely important if you serve a lot on weekends.

And sometimes it's easy, it's easy to think serving is the same thing as the pilot light.

Super not.

It's awesome, it's beautiful, it's worship unto God, but you got to work all the harder.

No, I'm not even just gonna listen to the sermon.

I'm gonna say, God, apply this to my life.

I'm gonna get on my knees.

This means even though it's not normal, normal people don't do this.

They don't go during the lunch hour, go into the car and just say, God, I need you to bring down heaven right now because I'm losing my mind.

I need a scripture and I'm gonna, I must take the time and be fun and maybe comforting, go talk to them.

But no, I need God right now, and so I'm gonna get this doggone furnace lit.

It takes a little bit more push, dude.

It takes a little bit more push so that the pastors and the podcasts don't become like Moses was to the Israelites.

Moses was kind of like the Wi-Fi of the ancient Israelites.

They they told them they were they're at the foot of Sinai and they said, Moses, you go.

You go talk to God.

We'll just take our stuff from you.

We'll tap into you, then we'll get the light version, we'll get all the important stuff.

Well, you will accept the relational part.

You'll get everything except the fire.

Somebody say fire.

I don't know, dude.

We got a whole other point.

Y'all still getting something out of this?

Is there any fire in it, you think?

Here's the last one.

What'll harden a soft heart is a seared conscious conscience.

This is how we said it in Hebrews.

You must warn each other every day while it is still today, so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.

There's a deceitfulness of sin, there's a trick of sin.

Sin begins to make us duller and duller to the point where it's it's weird we don't see it anymore.

So first it might bother us this little thing, I might I feel convicted by it.

But then I do it a little bit more and it stops bothering me, and I start to rename it.

Well, that's not really sin, that is this.

Because I feel it less and less and less, and then I start to barely feel it.

And what I don't know is that just tricked you.

It wanted to be hidden, and it just helped you hide it.

But that sin is not only making you numb to the sin, to the conviction, it's hardening your heart toward the Lord.

You just can't feel it, you just don't know it, but it's happening even when you don't see it.

There's distance growing between you and God, and there's a piece of your heart that's saying, This is fine.

Maybe you don't want that to happen, but you're giving yourself to that sin, and it's keeping things calloused with God.

I've got this weird callus right here.

I've been looking at this for a couple years, I'm like, what is what is this?

What am I just some weird old what is that?

I don't know.

My wife even looks at it, she's what is that?

I don't know, babe.

I don't know, I don't know where that comes from.

Then recently I was sitting at my desk on the on the computer, typing away, and I went and put my elbow on the desk.

And you think I just grabbed my chin like this and kind of looked, and I went, put my teeth right there, just resting my teeth on there.

I'd hadn't known that I'd been doing that for several years, and so it just callused up.

It just takes that's a tooth callus, weirdly.

But hopefully it communicates the message of guys, I didn't even know what it came from.

I didn't know why I was hard.

Are we hearing that?

I don't know why my heart was hard.

That's what's it so you see the parallel.

Sin tricks you.

You don't remember why.

Why am I not getting through to God?

Why am I feeling distant from him?

Why is this hard?

It's hard because you're embracing something you shouldn't.

And this is where it's really hard to ask for conviction because we've normalized sin and we say, Lord, would you prick my heart again?

And and it can be very scary because it's like, God, do whatever you gotta do to show me this is evil again.

And accountability helps.

So, like, yeah, accountability relationships are great.

People asking you the tough questions.

Here's the problem: even accountability can't soften a hard heart.

Only Jesus can do that.

That's why we gotta be really bold and ask for a soft heart.

A soft heart keeps trusting Jesus when life gives it reasons not to.

I'm gonna invite the worship team to come back out when they're ready.

Guys, a soft heart.

I hope we're seeing it is difficult to maintain.

It's something you're gonna have to do your whole life.

Life is gonna treat you in such a way that it's like, I've got to guard myself now.

See, because pain comes along and it's gonna hurt, and I'm best if I just do this.

And fear comes along, and I'm gonna wanna run.

It's best if I just don't even encounter that at all.

Fear's gonna come along and it's going to give me a false interpretation of the facts of who God is and what he's doing.

And my heart's gonna be hard.

I'm gonna believe that thing instead of backing up and be like, oh no, no, no.

No, that's not true of who God is.

I'm believing God, I'm gonna trust that God has my good in mind.

So the pastor, the writer of Hebrews, says, guys, careful, pay attention, don't let yourself drift away.

Instead, be listen to this.

Jesus says to you and me, I was faithful to you.

I was faithful to you the whole way, the whole way up Calvary, the whole way up onto the cross.

I was faithful to you.

Be faithful to me and keep a soft heart.

What I want to do right now is actually ask God for forgiveness for the places we've allowed our hearts to be hard.

So I don't know where that is for you, but I'll just encourage you to open yourself.

Even if you're watching online, open yourself to the idea there may be places I have walled off or bricked off that God wants back open.

But it's gonna take conviction.

So let's pray.

Lord, the soul is too complex for us to completely understand, but you see it.

First, we want to thank you for your faithfulness to us, Jesus.

You have always been faithful, and we want to acknowledge we have not.

We've misrepresented you, we've misjudged situations, we've run exactly the opposite direction you called us to go.

We doubted your goodness and didn't go into awesome promised lands that you probably had for us.

God, would you forgive us?

We we repent and ask forgiveness for that.

But I also know a part of life is we build walls and we build calluses so that we don't get hurt again, or we there's things we don't see.

And so we're asking you, would you come soften and bring conviction that only you can bring.

Use our circumstances, use some random thing somebody says, use God's word to teach us again what we're trying not to know.

That this hurts you and it creates distance between us.

Oh God, we want a soft heart.

Give us a soft heart today.

Show us the places that we need to invite you in afresh, no matter the cost, so that we can be soft to you again.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, folks, that's all the time we have, but thank you so much for listening to this sermon.

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And whatever else you do, make sure that you believe God for something big today.