Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 732
Delivered on Lord’s-day Morning, JANUARY 27, 1867, by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.”- Matthew 15:19.
WE cannot too often insist upon it that religion is a matter of the heart. It is the besetting sin of man to forget that God is a Spirit and that worship rendered to God must be of a spiritual kind. Idolatry is the full carrying out of this mischievous propensity. Instead of adoring the Great Invisible and giving Him the love of the heart, man sets up a block of wood or stone, and, burning incense and performing genuflections before it, he cries, “This is my god.” Where this idolatry does not assume the very grossest form it takes another which is equally as objectionable in the sight of God. Man pleads that he cannot worship God with his heart unless his memory is assisted by some outward object, and then he smuggles in his idol and gratifies his depraved nature with will worship and outward formalism.
God requires soul worship and men give him body worship! He asks for the heart and they present Him with their lips. He demands their thoughts and their minds, and they give Him banners, and vestments, and candles. Where man is hunted by very shame from outward superstitions, he betakes himself to anything sooner than yield his heart’s love to his Maker, submit his intellect to the great Creator’s teaching, or render all his faculties to the service of the Most High. No matter how painful may be the mortification, rigid the penance, severe the abstinence—no matter how much may be taken from his purse or the wine vat, or the store—he will be content to suffer anything sooner than bow before the Most High with a true confession of sin, and trust in the appointed Savior with sincere childlike faith.
In this age, as much as in past times, the watchmen of our Israel must insist upon the spirituality of worship, for the old paganism lives among us—altered in form but unchanged in spirit. We spoke of idolatry as being buried at Athens and consigned to its tomb at Rome, but it lives in the Puseyism of the present hour! Men are naturally idolaters and it is nothing but idolatry which nowadays, in the toyshops of the Tractarian, is polluting the simplicity of our worship by thrusting their childish symbols and emblems before the sublime Truth that God is to be worshipped in spirit, and only to be approached through the atoning sacrifice of His only begotten Son.
This morning I trust I shall not be guilty of attracting your attention for a single moment to anything that is external, however gaudy or however simple. It is to the human heart that I ask you now to turn your eyes. It is to your own hearts, my Hearers, you that are converted and you that are not! It is to a consideration of your own inner natures that I entreat you now to turn your serious thoughts. My text is a looking glass in which every man may see himself. He may see not his face which he can see anywhere—but his heart, his moral nature, his innermost self. Here sin is in many a heart laid bare, turned inside out, anatomized and depicted by One who cannot lie and cannot be deceived.
We shall come to the text at once, and observe, first, the humiliating doctrine which it teaches. Then we shall occupy the rest of your time by mentioning the kindred doctrines of which it reminds us.
I. FIRST NOTICE THE HUMILIATING TRUTH which the Savior here sets forth. He tells us that out of the heart all sorts of moral evils proceed. He selects not the milder forms of sin but the grosser shades—adulteries, murders, blasphemies—these are words of no common import—and stand for sins of no common dye. The accusation laid against human nature here is one of the most solemn that could possibly be put into words. The Savior has not minced matters in any degree nor chosen smooth forms of speech. He has selected the grossest shapes of human sin and He has said that all these come out of the human heart.
There have been men who have asserted that sins are merely accidents of man’s position. But the Savior says they come out of his heart. Some have affirmed that they are mistakes of his judgment—that the social system bears so harshly at certain points that men can scarcely do otherwise than offend—for their judgment misleads them. The Savior, how-
ever, traces these offenses not to the head and its mistaken judgments, but to the heart and its unholy affections. He plainly tells us that the part of human nature which yields such poisonous fruit is not a bough which may be sawn off, a limb which may be cut away—but the very core and substance of the man—his heart.
He, in effect, tells us that lust does not come out of the eyes merely, but from the inmost nature of a depraved being. Murder comes not, in the first place, from the hasty hand but from a wild ungovernable heart. He declares that theft is not the mere result of a hasty temptation, but is the outflow of a covetous desire which dwells in the being of which disorganized affections are the real source. All the mischiefs mentioned in our text come out of man’s essential self—that is what I understand the Savior to mean by the heart.