You Are What You Practice

Introduction

Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have a special kind of feeling for mornings, don’t you? Mornings are special. You ever notice that we never speak of the evening of the resurrection? I’ve always thought that probably the resurrection, when it does come again, when Jesus comes, will come. Perhaps on the Lord’s Day, and perhaps in the morning. We always look up for mornings. No matter how bad the nightmare of the night before, when the first rays of the new sun splash across your quilt, everything is forgiven, it seems to me, and everything looks good again, and you have a new page to write in your chapter on life. And so mornings are special, and then when you add to that the Lord’s Day, and you think of the reason that we’re here, and the fact that Jesus was resurrected on the Lord’s Day, then you have something special.

I think of the time when the angel appeared and said, Whom are you seeking? He is not here. And then one of the most fabulous sentences that can fall from the lips of any person is uttered. He is not here, he is risen. He is risen. Everything that we’re about, everything that has to do with who and what we are, is connected to that simple statement. He is risen. And that’s why we’re here this morning. And if you’re a visitor in our midst, we want you to know that we believe with all of our heart that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And the reason that we believe that is that He is risen. We believe that He has spoken to us through His Word, that the Bible is the inerrant and inspired Word of God.

And the reason we believe that is because He is risen. And so we are glad that you’re here. And we want you to ask any question that you might want to ask. We don’t have any pomposity here. We don’t have any kind of exclusivism. We just want to preach what the Bible preaches, say what the Bible says, and live like the Bible dictates, so that when this life is over and he comes again, we will be risen and go to heaven to live with him forever. If that’s your aspiration, we should be glad to talk with you. And if you have some questions about what we do and why we do it, please ask. If we can’t give an answer, maybe you have something that’ll help us.

1. We Are Created Free Moral Agents

We’re just trying to get to heaven. So be uh associated with us. Let us uh be together and discuss the things of God. We’re going to be talking this week about the idea of the wisdom that we need to deal with this world. And there are all kinds of implications that pertain to that, and there are all kinds of ramifications that come out of that. But it all begins with who and what we are. It all begins with the fact that we are created moral agents, that we are created free moral agents. When you talk about free moral agency, what you’re talking about is the fact, first of all, that we are agents. And that word simply means someone who is empowered to act. The human family is empowered to act in a peculiar way.

It’s not like the animal world, which operates under a law of necessity. When a dog gets uh hungry, he eats whatever, and you can’t accuse him of stealing because he took the stake off the grill next door. He’s just doing what he’s pre-programmed to do. And the same is true with his sexual prowess. He doesn’t wait until he’s in a private place. He just does what comes naturally. And humans are not that way. Humans are empowered to act, but they’re empowered to act in a free way. They are free moral agents. They’re empowered to act in regard to morality. Now, the idea of morality is the ability to differentiate between what is right and what is wrong. And it argues graphically that there is a there is a right and there is a wrong.

When you speak of morals, you’re speaking of something that is right or something that is wrong. If it is right, then it is moral. If it is wrong, then it is immoral. And so at the very outset, we need to understand who and what we are. Now we not only are empowered to act in regard to those things, but we also are free moral agents. We don’t have an imposition placed upon us. God does not say you must do this. Now he does tell us that whatsoever you sow, that’s what you’re going to reap. But he doesn’t place us under an obligation that is so determined that we can’t have any choice in the matter. So when we speak about free moral agency, we’re talking about someone who is fitted for choice.

We are fitted to make certain choices. And our judgment, ladies and gentlemen, is dependent upon the fact that we are free moral agents. And sometimes I think we don’t think about that. We don’t talk about that. We need to understand at the very outset of what we’re going to do this week. That free moral agency is where it all begins. That everything starts right with the recognition of who and what we are and what is our obligation for being born into the world. We are given life, according to Paul’s statement to the Areopagites in Acts 17 by God. He gave us life. In him we live and move and have our very being. The very breath that we breathe is a gift of God. And he gives it to us freely.

But we are responsible for developing something in this life. We’re responsible for living in a certain way so that we can recapture what was got what was lost in the Garden of Eden, and that is our relationship intimately with God Almighty. It has been impeded because men made poor choices. It has been destroyed because man blighted himself through sin. And sin, being divisive in its very nature, has separated God and man. In fact, the writer of the book of Isaiah said, your sins and your iniquities have separated between you and your God. Your sins have hid his face so that he will not hear. And so our free moral agency is where it all starts. We are responsible beings. We are human beings. We are the pinnacle of God’s creation.

We are the only ones. And people are always asking me, why didn’t God make us so that we couldn’t sin? And he could have. I mean, he could have. Dogs and cats don’t sin. But he did not make us as automatons. And there’s a reason for that. Sometimes when we quote Romans chapter 3 and verse 10, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, we are making the observation and emphasizing the fact that all have sinned. And that’s a good passage to prove that. But I want you to see the back half of that passage. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Can I just suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that the reason we’re made like we are was to bring glory to God.

The only part of God’s creation that can deliberately choose to serve God is mankind. Man decides that he’s going to serve God. And as a result of that, he brings glory and honor to God in a way that the vegetable kingdom cannot do, in a way that the animal kingdom cannot do, in a way that the uh various planets that whirl around cannot do. They are all settled. But man says, I’m going to serve God because I choose to do so, because I see in him goodness and grandeur, because I see in him awesomeness and wonder. And I decide of my own volition, I’m going to serve God. And that is the predicate on which all of our activities rests. We are free moral agents. So let’s get that fixed in our minds at the very outset.

2. As a Man Thinketh in His Heart, So Is He

We’re not going to talk about that every night. And every one of these lessons will be complete within itself, but they’ll all be tied together in a way that will show that this free moral agency is where it all begins. And so I want us to get that fixed in our minds. I also want us to see that since man is a rational, reasoning, reasonable human being, that he must have something to be reasoned with. He must have something to deliberate, something to think about. Now, man is a thinking individual. I want you to picture in your mind a man here. And certain information is fed into his mind. Information. Information comes in several different ways. Information comes by observation. Sensical perceptions are a part of this information that a man takes into his mind with which he’s going to deliberate.

For instance, the sensual perception, if you stick your hand on a stove and you understand that it burns, it hurts you, then you have experiential knowledge stored up immediately. You’re not going to do that anymore. You see. So you quit doing that right away. And you have experiential knowledge of various sorts. You smell some things. If you smell a skunk, you don’t like it. You store up that smell in your mind. You say, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want that anymore. And the same is true with good smells. If you smell the barbecue, then you say, My, that makes my mouth water. And all of that is fodder for thinking. That’s information that comes into your mind by sensical perceptions. There is information that is fed into your mind by learning.

That is where you take somebody else’s information and you deliberate that information. I said you deliberate that information in your mind and it becomes part of you. I verily believe that one of the most use loose, useless things in the lives of most people is the fact that they don’t meditate. We’re so busy anymore that we don’t engage the idea of meditation. Meditation takes information. And what you do with meditation is that you throw a mental screen up in your mind and you run over it again by instant replay, the things that you’ve learned, the things that you know about. And that’s called thinking. That’s called thinking. You take information and you deliberate it and you meditate it and you cogitate it, and the first thing you know, you’re able to reach decisions.

That’s the process of the will. That’s the free moral agency at work. But it all begins, folks, with what you think. So what you put in your mind is very important. Is it any wonder then that the wise man would say, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. We become what we think. We become what we think about. We become what we deliberate. If you feed your mind the fodder of ungodliness and filth that you see on television in so many different places, you will some way or the other be impressed with that. Don’t take that word for granted. And impression is what information makes on the mind. And that’s where you store up information with which to meditate. And so if you’re not careful, your impressions are poor impressions, and as a result, your thinking becomes poor thinking, and as a result of that, sequentially you become somebody that’s not doing what he ought to do, you see.

And so thinking becomes so very vital to everything that we do. What we let in our minds is our choice. What we determine to contemplate or muse or deliberate about, that is our choice. And I said to you that it’s my considered opinion that one of the real dearths in most Christians’ lives is meditation. We’re so busy with other things that we don’t have time to meditate. Let me suggest something to you. We need to separate ourselves from the duresses and pressures of existing circumstances long enough to get off and think about God every day. Blessed is the man who walks not in the council of the ungodly and does all of those other things, but his delight, his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate both day and night.

Now that’s not to say that he gets up and he thinks about the word of God the first thing in the morning, and just before he quits praying at night, he’s thinking about the word of God. That’s not it. But it is saying that he is consistently and intimately connected to the word of God. That is absolutely indispensable to our getting out of this world alive. It is absolutely necessary to a regulated life that results in the glorification of God. It’s absolutely indispensable to raising, rearing a good family. It’s absolutely necessary to being the kind of citizen that you ought to be, to being the kind of worker that you ought to be. It has all kinds of practical ramifications. But it all started, it all started with what you let in your mind.

And so you have to have something there to regurgitate so that you can bring it back up and chew it all over again, just like the old cow chews is good again, and you make decisions based on that information. Now, two things come out of that. Listen to me. What you let in is really important, and what you let stay there is really important. The apostle Paul said, give no place to the devil. Now listen to me, folks. You cannot keep the birds from flying over your head, someone has said, but you can keep them from making a nest in your hair. Everybody can do that, right? Now listen, you can’t keep the devil from going through your mind. He’s going to worm his way in there occasionally.

He’s going to get into your head now and then, but you don’t have to say, look, here’s a couch over here. Sit down. Let’s talk a little while. You don’t have to give him a place to stay, you see. So it’s all a matter of what you let in. That’s the first thing. And then the other thing is that what you let stay there. You just don’t let those things stay there. Now, having said those things, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. I want you to look at a passage of scripture and uh read with me from Philippians, the fourth chapter. Therefore, my beloved brethren, long for my joy and crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. Two things stand out, first of all, in that passage, and that is first Paul’s attitude toward these people.

He calls them dearly beloved with an emphasis that we would call italics or bold. He underlines dearly beloved twice there. Do you see that? And then he says, I beseech or I beg. It’s interesting to me how Paul does those kinds of things. He doesn’t go at somebody going in and giving orders. He said, I beseech you, Odysseus, and I beseech Syntike, that they be of the same mind in the Lord. Now it’s it’s important what kind of mind you have, and he’s going to say a little about that mind as it pertains to the Philippians in just a minute. But to these two people, he’s saying that you should be in accord. You should be together. And I entreat all, thee also, true yoke fellow, help those women which labored with me in the gospel with Clement also, and with other of my fellow laborers, whose names are in the book of life.

What encouragement that is. That feeds the mind with a positive kind of attitude that really looks good. And then he says, rejoice in the Lord. And again I say rejoice. You have to have something to rejoice about, folks. You don’t just rejoice for the sake of rejoicing. You rejoice because your salvation is in Jesus Christ. That’s what he’s saying. Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. Be careful, be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known unto God. Here again is the idea of information. Here’s the idea of the intercourse between you and God, based upon the information that you have. You ought to thank him, he says all the time, and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ.

We’ve already had that mind first with Euodis and Syntachi, and now all of a sudden we have it with all the people. He said, if the peace of God is there, you have a tranquil mind. You have a mind devoid of intrusions and worry and anxiety. And then he says, the peace of God which passeth all comprehension shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things. I want you to see what he saith here about your mind. If you put these things in your mind, you will have what he describes in the first chapter as the excellent mind.

You will have a mind that is he has just said here is has subtracted from it all of the impediments that keep you from being joyous. And even in the midst of intensity and in the midst of difficulties of various proportions, you will have a determination that is so far superior to the things that have invaded your peace that your peace will still be there. A Christian who has the peace of God in his heart, cannot be touched by any adversity, including being dragged to his own death by his enemies, that will pervade his peace. He cannot, because he has something that reaches off and attaches itself onto eternity. And so he has something that just transcends this earth. That’s the reason I’m saying to you that it’s so important that we divorce ourselves from our existing pressures and the duresses of our job or family and sit off by ourselves for 15 or 20 minutes every day and think about God and talk with him.

I aver, I may be wrong about this, but I aver that if you will think about God seriously for five minutes, you can’t keep from praying. The fact is you’re just gonna thank him for what you’ve got. And if you’re in touch with him all the time, you’re going to have a better life. I wish I could get people to see that. If I could get people to see that, then people would be a lot happier. We would eliminate so many problems in churches. If we just put our confidence in God and in his word, and if we would give our times to th some time to thinking about him and listening to what he has to say with a constancy. So he says, finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true.

3. Think on Things That Are True

Whatsoever things are true. I want us to see that true things are those things that are not deceptive. True things are things that are not deceptive. True things are things that are spiritually true. Truth always plums with every other truth. There is no such thing as true truths that contradict one another, you see. So if you’re thinking on true things, if you’re thinking on things that are not deceptive or illusionary, then your mind is going to result in your being that kind of person. You won’t build your life on an illusion. You won’t build your life on some of the devil’s deceptions. You won’t have this temporariness that so many people have. You will have something that is real. You will not be chasing a pipe dream all the time.

Something that is promised, which cannot be delivered. That’s what the devil gives you. He gives you thinking that says you can do this. You can shortcut, for instance. Or you go ahead and miss, it won’t hurt anything. And that kind of thinking is illusionary. It’s not real. And so you need to think on spiritually true things, things that are not false or fictitious. Think on God’s principles. If you think on God’s things, you cannot go wrong. I don’t care who you are. And as I said to you, what happens when you think about God’s things is you get closer to him. And as you get closer to him, you get further away from sin and ungodliness and filth and decadence. As you’re closer and closer to God, that’s the Christian’s real chore.

Is to become as close to God as he can. And the way he does that is he meditates both day and night. The apostle Paul says, pray without ceasing. That’s another idea. There are two great privileges in life that transcend all others. One of them is having God speak to you through his word, and the other one is speaking to God. And we neglect those two things with a kind of prodigality. We’re wasteful about our time. We need to give some time to God to think on the high things. And please hear me carefully. We’re going somewhere with this. Wisdom, wisdom starts with good knowledge. There is no such thing, ladies and gentlemen. There’s a lot of wisdom and a little knowledge. It is not going to happen.

4. Things That Are Honest: Things That Have Dignity

And when somebody says, well, he’s just a wise man naturally. No, he’s not. I don’t care where he got the knowledge. He’s using knowledge that came somewhere. He may have a natural proclivity to make wise choices, but he is wise because the information with which he’s working is good information. And so the thinking becomes so absolutely vital. And thinking on true things is where it’s at. Then he says, things that are honest. Honest. This is not a bad translation of the Greek word here. The Greek word here has to do with honorable things. And when it says that, it speaks of respected things. And could I just suggest to you that the King James author is not wrong off the mark when he says honest things because respected things are always honest.

And honorable things are always honest. And it plums nicely with the idea of truth. And so he says, think on things that are honest or honorable. And what this is is things that have dignity. Things that have dignity. I have a big problem with the casualness that has arisen in the world today. We have lost almost all sense of dignity in our country. Are you aware of that? There is no dignified. I see some weddings where people go in their jogging shorts and they get married. I see some people that listen to me. The reason I say dignity is God is wedding, one of the most important things you do in your life is become wedded to a woman or a man. You make a choice there that involves three persons the man, the woman, and God.

And you’re in the presence of God when you do that. I see people waiting on the table in this day and age. And there’s no dignity any longer. I went a place where one time where a kid led the prayer, the closing prayer, and he had a Budweiser can on his. Now I’m not probably going to be invited back to that church to preach again. But there’ll be one boy that puts on his sweater with a great deal of caution anymore. That’s just not in order. That’s excessive casualness. This idea of honorableness is dignity. It’s things that it’s being selective about what you let in your mind. Think on things that have dignity attached to them. Things that are high and noble. Things that are righteous and good.

The idea of respected things. Only liars do not respect the truth, people. Anybody who is anybody worth his salt respects the truth. We may not always like it. It may be condemnatory. It may even be self-condemnatory at times because of our own introspection. We find ourselves at fault. But the fact of the matter is that it always has dignity. And it’s never out of order to say, I had that wrong. I just was not thinking high things. I wish we could see that. A part of dignity is to admit where you are in the presence of God Almighty. We need to be a people who revere Him with such high devotion that we’re not going to let anything come between us and Him. Let me ask you a question.

5. Things That Are Just: Things That Fit

Whether your politics is high or not, if the president were to come to your house, would you clean up the house? Why, my wife would have stuff worn down. She’d dust it so hard. She does that anyway. But she’d really do it that way. Would you clean up yourself and look pretty nice? Well, how about being in the presence of God Almighty? How about that? Things that are high, honorable things, precious things, morally upright things, reverence for good and honor and truth. Then he says, not only respecting things that have dignity, not only being selective about letting in the noble things, but he says things that are just. Things that are just. That’s interesting term to me. This is uh this is righteous things. It’s the opposite of unclean things.

It’s uh it’s really things that uh are recognizable. Uh something that is done that is noble. Uh things that really matter, maybe is the best illustration. Uh think on things that are just, things that fit into their place. Did you ever notice that fitting is a real part of life? I probably told you about my love of the idea of the little jumble. I do it every morning. That’s where I get my mind working. And it’s hard, folks, when you’ve got so little to work with to start with. But I get that booger working every morning by doing the jumble. And what you have to do is arrange things right. That’s this idea of just. I mean, you take an acronym up here, and it’s got all these letters in it, but they’re all scrambled up.

And what your job is is to put them in an order that makes sense. That’s just. That’s arranging things so that they make sense, so that they really have something to offer. Do you see that? I wish I could get that across to you. Just things are things that fit where they’re supposed to fit. My dad was a tailor. I grew up in dry cleaning shop, and my dad ordered suits for the old National Tailoring Company out of Chicago, Illinois. And one of his great forts was that he could measure a man, and when he got the suit back, it fit him exactly. And my dad would tell you this: he’d say, son, buy your clothes to fit. Things wear out where they don’t fit, he’d say.

Is that not so? Things wear out where they don’t fit. If something’s dragging, it’s going to rub on stuff. It’s not going to fit. So it wears out. The fact of the matter is that that’s this idea just. It’s things that have a place. Things that really matter, things that fit. And part of that is just prioritizing. It’s just lining things up like they ought to be. You know what? If I were to pass out a sheet of paper here this morning and I said, now, I want you folks to list in order the things that you think are important. Everybody here would have the same list. There wouldn’t be three people that would, and the differentiation would come down in the list, not at the top.

We’d put God at the top, wouldn’t we? And then next, we’d put family. And then third, we’d probably put job. Some of us would put golf third instead of job. But we’d put job and then we’d put hobby or we’d put uh some philanthropy that we’re involved with or some benevolent organization. And we’d line them up that way. But let me ask you a question. That’s an intellectual enterprise. Do we really mean that? I mean, do you really put God first? Do you actually place him where he fits in your life at the prominent place of all that you are? Do you consider him before you make any choice in regard to your job? Do you consider him before you make any choice about which way you’re going to do on this, that, or the other?

No matter how small it may be, do you make him the figure that you look to before you do that? As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. It’s not enough to just give intellectual assent to the fact that God is number one. You have to, you have to do something. I’ve tried so hard the last few years to try to get my people to understand that James, the second chapter was not written to the Baptist church. That faith without works in James chapter 2 is talking to Christians. And that’s what we do. We put God up here on this pedestal, and then we don’t do anything about it. We think because we got him up there, that’s all there is to it. As a man thinketh in his heart, so he becomes.

6. Think on Pure Things

That’s the point we need to keep in mind. So you think on things that matter, things that are just. Now, another part of justice is equitableness or fairness. But that’s the same thing. It’s the same sort of idea. It’s things that matter and things that fit in the right place. It’s being what you ought to be with what you have. It’s trying to put God in his proper place. And then he says, think on pure things. Pure things. Purity, it seems to me, issues in two different ways. It issues in a lack of pollution. And it also issues in a lack of dilution. And we don’t have as much trouble with the lack of pollution as we do dilution. What happens is that we take purity and we manage it to fit us.

Instead of fitting ourselves to pure things, to pure thinking, we let in our minds things are diluted. They’re watered down. Do you see the point of that? They’re watered down. They’ve lost a part of their strength. They don’t have the ability to do what they’re supposed to do. I get a big kick out of the difference between this epoxy glue and Elmer’s glue. The difference is really kind of interesting to me. I had a chemist friend that told me this. And he said, now when you have Elmer’s glue, what happens is that you put a bond up here, and that’s the glue, and then you put something on the bond, and it bonds this to this. And the bond is still there. It keeps those two things together.

But when you put epoxy, true epoxy cement on there, he said, what happens is that the chemicals in there, the molecular structure of that with this substance, begins to interlock with this substance. So that the bond is really strong because the two things are not connected to the bond, they’re connected to one another. That’s purity. That’s purity. You’ve not got something up here that just bonds things together. You’ve got connection. Connection. And connection is so important, so vital. We need to be connected to the high things, to the good things, to the noble things, as we’ve already pointed out. We need to have pure thinking in our mind. Thinking that is not watered down, but thinking that is high and noble, that is fit for deliberation.

Let me say that again. We need thinking that is pure enough for deliberation. We need a thinking that we can go out here by the tree and sit down, and when we conjure up that impression that we want to think about, it’s the very purest that it can be, you see. And then our deliberation is going to be pure, and then the likelihood of our choices being pure is enhanced greatly by the fact that we have a pure thing to deliberate. But if we deliberate something that is diluted, that’s what happens to our denominational friends. The gospel is watered down. Instead of saying he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, they say, just let Jesus into your heart. That’s a diluted idea. It is true that you need to let Jesus in your heart, but you need to know how to do that.

You don’t just say, come in, Lord, and he comes in. No, sir. You invite him by doing what he said to do to have him with your intercourse, with your relationship. And so then you need the