How to Win Within

Intro:

I cant tell you the amount of times I’ve watched my kids do something that i can’t rationalize in my mind. why would you do that? So, I ask them. And you know what answer I get the most? I don’t know. And usually that frustrates us and we demand an answer but the reality is, most often, they don’t know

And I know that to be true because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done something I really didn’t want to do

And I’ve thought back and analyzed and tried to come up with some deep reasoning but the truth is, I don’t know why

I don’t know why so often I do the things I don’t want to do and don’t do the things I want to do

I so badly, want to stop eating junk food and sometimes I can get pretty disciplined and force myself to stop

Other times I’m a terror in the kitchen

And most of the time I eat junk food I’m not even hungry

It’s not like it’s satisfying some life or death situation

I can tell myself all day long not to eat junk food.

I can read articles about how bad it is

I can listen to podcasts about how all of it is processed and unhealthy

But I can also tell you unless Jesus comes back this afternoon I haven’t eaten my last potato chip in my life because I’m gonna eat more of them at some point.

But why?

Let’s get a little more serious and real this morning

Why do you go back to drinking when you’ve told yourself you were going to quit?

Why do you go back to pornography when you know it’s ruining your marriage?

Why did you cuss out your employees even though you said last time would be the last time?

Why do you lie after you promised yourself you’d stop?

Why is it that I want to be righteous, I want to be good, I want to be the type of Christian God is asking me to be, the Bible calls me to be and I just can’t!

Well there is an answer, the Bible gives us an answer.

But the answer might not be what you think

In fact the answer is, you rarely do things based on what you think, you do things based on what you feel.

Now, it goes much deeper than this and we will get into that but boiled down here’s the truth

We don’t do something because we choose to, we do something because we want to

We are not primarily thinking creatures, we are primarily feeling creatures

And that is very frustrating to a guy who likes to think of himself as a thinking creature

You see the truth is, you are not primarily controlled by your mind

You are primarily controlled by your heart

And let me let you in on another secret, this is how God created you to be

So many Christians have gotten this wrong for so many years!

Now stay with me ok because I’m probably about to ruffle some feathers here and make you very skeptical about the rest of this message but stay with me until the end ok

Christianity is not primarily about saying no

No to fun, no to pleasure, no to whatever

Christianity is primarily about saying yes even yes to your desires

Now, there’s a problem with this and we will get there but the truth still remains. God has wired you to say yes to your desires.

God has wired you in a way that everything you do flows out and from your heart

For some of us, that might be one of the most freeing things we’ve ever heard in church

You see, for so long we’ve fought tooth and nail to say no to bad stuff and yes to good stuff

But ultimately what we realized is that passion beats preference

Passion wins out over preference every time!

But our problem is, we love the bad stuff and the good stuff is often boring

All those times when you tried not to do a certain sin but ended up doing it anyway, it’s not your wish to commit that sin

I don’t think any one of us wakes up thinking, I wonder how much I can sin today

Nevertheless you still do it! Why?

Because you wanted sin more

You heart treasured sin more than it treasured God

Passion beats preference every time!

The truth is, no matter how hard we fight it, there is something underneath it all that you can’t help but follow - your deepest wants

And it is your deep wants that God is after, because only your deep wants will truly change you

Luke 6:43–45 NIV

43 “No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. 44 Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers. 45 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

Proverbs 4:23 NIV

23 Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

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Good things come from good that is stored in the heart, evil things come from evil things stored in the heart

Everything you do flows from the heart

In other words, what happens outwardly is direct reflection to what is going on inwardly

Now I want to help make sure we are on the same page here so we are clear as we continue to talk about this over the next few weeks

The Bible takes a high view of the human heart

Who we are in our hearts is who we truly are

What we feel in our hearts is what we truly want

and God built us this way

And we will talk later about how this plays out but there is an important question that needs answering

What is the heart? What is this deep, true, controlling part of us that needs to be changed?

Is it just emotions? Is it just desires? Is it passion?

And those are helpful places to start but I want to use a precise word to talk about these deep wants in our hearts

The word is affections

So here is the working definition of affections: Your affections are the hardwired response to what your mind perceives.

So to say you only do what you want is to say you only ever follow your affections

Your affections are what you love and what you hate

They are what your truest self truly treasures

Now, I said we aren’t primarily thinkers and that is true but it doesn’t mean the mind doesn’t play a part, in fact the mind is the gateway to the heart

So, every time your mind encounters something, you have a reaction to it.

So, your mind perceives, your heart decides

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For some of you, you are steaming mad right now

For some of you, you are smiling and passionate

For others, you have no idea what’s going on and completely indifferent

Now how can all 3 of those responses be simultaneously true?

Because, your mind has trained your heart to respond in a way based on your affections or lack thereof

So affections are emotions but they are more than emotions

In fact, affection may at times even conflict with your more flippant and fleeting emotions

Right? You may get very frustrated with your spouse during a disagreement, but that doesn’t automatically mean your affections of love and commitment toward your spouse has altered at all.

Pastor and theologian Sam Storms defines the difference between emotions and affections this way:

Certainly there is what may be rightly called an emotional dimension to affections. Affections, after all, are sensible and intense longings or aversions of the will. Perhaps it would be best to say that whereas affections are not less than emotions, they are surely more. Emotions can often be more physiologically heightened states of either euphoria or fear that are unrelated to what the mind perceives as true. Affections, on the other hand, are always the fruit or effect of what the mind understands and knows.

As I’ve studied this, I think one of the more important distinctions is that affections always produce action, that is not always the case of our emotions.

So Jesus says, that the affections of your heart are always going to produce something

And Jesus boils it down real simply in Luke chapter 6.

He says, your affections will either produce good fruit or it will produce bad fruit and there is seemingly nothing in between.

And all of it stems from what is stored in your heart

And so you know what is in the heart based on what is on the person

The fruit tells us about the root

If the fruit is unhealthy, the tree is unhealthy

And that seems pretty obvious but where we often get everything wrong is by believing that if we clean up the outside, the inside will get fixed along with it.

If we do the right things through our will, we will ultimately become right in our heart

If we can gather up enough good fruit, we will become a good tree.

But this is impossible

We planted an orange tree in our yard several years ago

That orange tree has not produced the first orange

It got some disease one of the first years we’ve had it and has never done anything

For whatever reason it has stayed in it’s spot for probably 5 years

Now, my family has an orange grove down the road a little ways and those trees are actually younger than mine but most of them are big and green and beautiful and produce a massive amount of fruit

Trying to will ourselves to do the right things in hopes that it will change our heart is like me going to the orange grove, picking good oranges, and taping it to my dead orange tree.

Putting good fruit on a dead tree will not revive it

The tree has to be healthy first

We must address our hearts before we address our hands

If sin is on the tree, sin is in the heart.

And in the same way that good affections produce good fruit

Sin cannot produce fruit in your life unless it has root in your heart

And just plucking sin off the branches and sticking good fruit on wont suffice

You must address the wants and affections inside of you that brought it out.

So, some bad news and good news ok

Bad news is. Your heart has been corrupted by sin which makes you sinful down to your core

You sin because you want to sin

You sin because you love sin

You sin because you believe that you can satisfy you better than God can satisfy you

Sin has wired our hearts to love evil and hate good

But here is the good news, your heart can be rewired.

And it needs to be rewired.

God’s solution to your heart problem is Jesus

He gives us the most captivating picture of his glory in Christ Jesus

The reasons why our fight against sin is often ineffective is because we haven’t been fighting sin, we’ve been fighting its fruit

Just stop sinning is not a good enough goal

Telling yourself to just say no is not good enough because sin is not external to you, it is hardwired within you, operating on your affections

Your affections can’t be unplugged, they can only rewired.

You see, your real problem with sin is not only in the sins you are committing.

Your problem is not one specific sin, but your desire for sin itself.

God is not just interested in a specific sin to stop in your life, he wants your heart to change

He doesn’t want you to just stop sinning, he wants to change your desire to want that sin

If you want to change your will to sin, you must change your want to sin

For out of your heart, everything flows

You will never do anything sustainably, authentically, or in a satisfying manner if your heart isn’t in it

Over the next few weeks we are going to talk about how this plays out and what this looks like so I highly encourage you to come back so we can begin to learn how to rewire our hearts.

but for today we have to realize that the gospel is not behavior modification, it is heart transformation

Self-help tactics will fail us because we can’t help ourselves.

We are helpless! The gospel is built on this fact.

We could not do anything for ourselves, so God did everything for us

It is based on this help given to us by God in Christ that our hearts can be changed

Jesus did not go to the cross to get you stop sinning, He went to the cross to give you the ability to change your heart, to change your desires, to effect your affections.

To give you new life. Why do you think Jesus say that you must be born again?

What controls life and death? The heart.

In order for you to change your affections, your heart has to stop beating, it has to die

And the Spirit of God has to give you a new one through Jesus

The Spirit reorients our wants, while Christ’s glory in the gospel captivates our affections, producing in us a will to obey the Father.

We know this from all the way back in Ezekiel chapter 36. This has been the plan all along.

So, I’ll read this for us and then pray and we can wrap up this morning

Ezekiel 36:26–28 NIV

26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.

This is what the Lord wants for us. And aren’t His desires so much better than ours!

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