Luke 6:43-49

  Luke 6:43-49

How many times have we heard after the conviction of a person for some horrible crime their parent, friend, or spouse or the convict himself/herself says he/she is not a bad person or protests they’re really a good person. Jesus takes a different position. Jesus says that the evil that we produce and manifest comes from that which we have stored up in our hearts. Behavior is the overflow of the warehouse that we call the heart. We are the ones who admit or reject the packaging or the cargo that comes to the warehouse of the heart.

There is an unbreakable link between our hearts and our behavior. Talk is cheap, especially religious talk. Mouthing the right religious or pious words without the heart commitment is in Jesus' opinion a perfect plan for disaster. When behavior does not conform to the will of the Lord (note He said nothing about words) it is like a house built on sand. Jesus says nothing about the motivation for such a building plan. He expresses the fact that ruin is the only possibility for a house built without a foundation. Comforting and pious words that are not true words, that do not warn, are the most deadly poison. While not stated directly, we can suppose without doing violence to the Scripture, that the man who built without a foundation was shocked. He had no idea that his home would be completely ruined. For him ruin was inconceivable, the inevitable never occurred to him.

What fills out heart inevitably comes out; that is inevitable. We need to learn to ignore our own pious words and take careful, serious inventory of our hearts.

“Lord, bring your judgment on the contents of my heart. AMEN”