Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“When famine or plague comes to the land, or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers, or when an enemy besieges them in any of their cities, whatever disaster or disease may come, and when a prayer or plea is made by anyone among your people Israel—being aware of the afflictions of their own hearts, and spreading out their hands toward this temple—then hear from heaven, your dwelling place. Forgive and act; deal with everyone according to all they do, since you know their hearts (for you alone know every human heart), so that they will fear you all the time they live in the land you gave our ancestors.

• 1 Kings 8:37-40

He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”

• Mark 7:20-23

“Solomon was the wisest and the wealthiest of kings, yet he says that ‘the plague of his own heart’ knocked him out (see 1 Kings 8:38). This is the first lesson every one of us has to learn. To begin with we are not prepared to accept Jesus Christ’s diagnosis of the human heart, we prefer to trust our own ignorant innocence. Jesus Christ says, ‘Out of the heart proceed fornication, adultery, murder, lasciviousness, thieving, lying,’ etc. (Mark 7:21-23). No man has ever believed that. We have not the remotest conception that what Jesus says about the hu­ man heart is true until we come up against something further on in our lives. We are apt to be indignant and say-‘I don’t believe those things are in my heart’, and we refuse the diagnosis of the only Master there is of the human heart. We need never know the plague of our own heart and the terrible possibilities in human life if we will hand ourselves over to Jesus Christ; but if we stand on our own right and wisdom at any second an eruption may occur in our personal lives, and we may discover to our unutterable horror that we can be murderers, etc. This is one of the most ghastly and humiliating and devastating truths in the whole of human experience …
“Education cannot deal with the plague of the heart, all our vows cannot touch it; the only Being Who can deal with it is God through a personal relationship to Him, by receiving His Spirit after accepting the diagnosis of Jesus Christ.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (February 7, from Shade of His Hand)

Is anyone without sin?  No, no one is without sin.  Only Jesus withstood the temptations of Satan without sin.

So, to be without sin, we need to rely on a power much higher than our own.

You wonder about the people that you meet in church.  Some have God in their heart, and others do not.  But among those who have God in their heart, some struggle constantly.  They are under attack by Evil.  Others seem to breeze by.  Have they mastered their temptations or do they hide the fact that they have a sinful life that may not manifest itself outside their mind?

Solomon’s afflictions of the heart were many, with 700 wives and 300 concubines, he was constantly distracted.  It would take a solution-driven sage of great wisdom to remain on task in ruling the nation properly with so many distractions.

My wife used to tell me, “You are up to no good.”

I would respond, “I am driving you to a doctor appointment, and I intend to go straight home after the doctor is finished.”

My wife would nod, and then say, “But I saw that smile and the long-off stare.  You may not have been planning to do evil.  You were being naughty right there in that big brain of yours.”

Sometimes she got that one wrong, but most of the time, she knew me.  While some of those naughty things in Mark 7 are far from my mind most of the time, there are times where it seems that those evil thoughts are the prizes on Wheel of Fortune.  Spin the Wheel and see where it stops, then enjoy a naughty pleasure – a pleasure that is not even fulfilling while thinking of it and then the agony that I failed to resist the temptation, yet again.

We all do it.  We can look well-put-together on the outside, but where has our mind wandered?

If we fill our mind with God’s Word, there is less chance of that happening, but beware of the tests of faith.  Satan asked God for permission to test Job, someone who no fault could be seen.  The closer we get to Jesus, the more active Evil is around us, to test us and to attempt harm on our Christian witness before others.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.