What is Lukewarmness? -- Part 5

No Christian can produce within himself or herself what only the Holy Spirit can. We cannot make ourselves holy. We cannot discipline ourselves enough to be holy. We cannot train our hearts into submission to Christ. The crucifixion of the old, self nature is a work of Divine grace, wrought within the heart by faith. I can only speak with certainty about this from my own experience ... but I have read and heard other Christians express the same conclusions. It was not so-called "holiness preaching" that brought me to the place where I sought the Lord for victory over the old, carnal nature. It was the condition of my heart! It was the defilement of my heart! It was the dirtiness of my spirit that condemned me!

Now I am not describing "feelings" as such when I talk about a "dirtiness of spirit". Our human emotional system is not the place to take any measurements of our spiritual temperature, for our feelings characteristically (at least for most of us) run more on a roller coaster than a straight track. Most of the time mood swings, as we call them today, have little or nothing to do with any spiritual condition. When we think about what I have termed a "dirtiness of spirit" it relates more to motives than feelings. This is why we are talking about the cleansing of the human heart now. The carnal, uncleansed heart is for self satisfaction, and self appreciation, and for self interest, and for self recognition. You get the idea. It is self, self, self .. me, me, me ... and my, my, my! All through this study about lukewarmness we will be returning to this sobering truth.

Jesus made it so clear in some of His very earliest teachings in the so-called Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:20, where He proclaimed this most basic truth: "For where your treasure is there will your heart be also ". Here is a most crucial claim and conclusion by our Lord! "Where your treasure is there will your heart be also"! This will never vary. It is ,as definite,and even absolute, as anything God ever said to the human family. What dominates~rson's life~ is his or her master. What we continually think about, and where our minds return any time we have spare minutes, and what in our daily lives claims our supreme attention, and what we want to do and think about and on what spend our time and attention and money is what is in our hearts! What is in our hearts is what will come out of it!

Our hearts are as much like a fountain of waters as anything I could describe. The scripture even uses this analogy when Jesus spoke of what occurs when the Holy Spirit comes in to take control of a person's innermost nature. Let me read it to you from John 7:38 & 39a:"He who believes on Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water. But this spoke He of the Holy Spirit Who they that believe on Him should receive ... ". Jesus, Himself, describes the inner, heart, condition of the Spirit filled Christian as one that is as a flowing fountain of waters. We are born into this world with that inner, "heart fountain" polluted and stained with more interest and concern for self than God or other persons.

To make matters worse, we live in a world that S~tan has superbly sold on the idea that we need to love ourselves, and be good to ourselves, ~atisfY ourselves, and please ourselves. Then in the last thirty or forty years, a good number of preachers have built entire, multi-million dollar ministries on the "self esteem" idea of "feeling good about ourselves", The Christ ofthe church wants me to warn us of the dangers of such erroneous teaching, for it plays right into the hands of Satan's latter day trap of hustling us with promises of everything being okay, when the truth is that we are "wretched and miserable, and poor, and blind and naked"!