02/07 – Matthew 5:21-37 – Create in Me a Clean Heart Oh God
February 7, 2021
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The readings from God’s Word today appear full of Law.
Obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today.1
Jesus says:
You shall not murder…
You shall not commit adultery…
You shall not swear falsely…2
Many, when hearing these words, see them as things we have to do to stay in the God’s good graces.
If you look a bit more closely, you discover that they’re not really about what you have to do or not do. They’re actually about your heart. Moses is warning the people about their hearts turning away from God.3 Jesus is teaching that sin is, in truth, not just what you do or not do, but a problem with the heart. He reveals that beneath all these sins are problems of the heart. Things like anger, hatred, pride, and lust. Problems that, even if you took out your eyes and cut off your hands, would remain. To be rid of these sins, you’d have to cut out your heart, which is to die.
So what we need are new hearts, clean hearts. That is what David wrote after he did all those things that Jesus talked about today; after he lusted after his Bathsheba; after he committed adultery with her; after he murdered her husband Uriah to cover it up.
So God sent Nathan the prophet to speak His Word to David, to reveal the sin in his heart, which caused David then to pray:
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and renew a right spirit within me.4
David needed forgiveness sure, but also a new heart. It is only from a new, a clean heart, that new life could be found. So David prayed: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” That word create is an important one. Whenever God creates, he always does so ex nihilo.5 From nothing. In the beginning, when God created all things, He did so, ex nihilo, from nothing.
It’s the same thing with the good that He gives to, and works in, us. To create a clean heart in us is not to use anything in us, to simply reform or improve our hearts. He creates a new and clean hearts in us, ex nihilo, from nothing existing within us.
Before God works in us we are dead in our sins,6 but by His Word of forgiveness He creates in us what was not there. He takes our hearts, that are by nature sinful and unclean, and creates in us new and clean hearts. Not just once. How often does sins display itself in our hearts and make us unclean again? That is why Luther said the Christian life is a life of constant repentance. Which is a constant reliance not on what we do, but on the life-giving forgiveness and cleansing of God.
David’s prayer did not stop with “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” He went on to say, “and renew a right spirit within me.” You see along with the grace and forgiveness of God, we need a new spirit. We need our old ways to be renewed. To make them new again, as they were in the beginning, filled with and controlled by, not our old sinful spirit but, the Spirit of God. That we not think that God’s love is conditional or earned by what we do, but that we learn to see God and His love as God gives it.
To learn that, the Word and Spirit of God point our eyes to the cross. There is the unconditional love of God for you, in the person and work of Jesus. His love that did not say, ‘clean up your act, get better, and then I’ll love you,’ but who came for us while we were still sinners.7 Who came for us while we, like David, were still wallowing in our sins. Who came and offered up His body, though He did not sin, for all of us that do. As our substitute in death, He provide life in His resurrection from the dead.
That is the life now given to you through the water of Holy Baptism. There, the Word and Spirit of God join you to Jesus in His death and resurrection so that you die and rise with Him to a new life.8 All your sinfulness is offered up and cut off, and you are raised in forgiveness to a new life, with a new heart, a new spirit, and a new love.
This new love is not just a love of God our Savior, but a love for one another. The truth is, these are not two different kinds of loves: one for God, and one for our neighbor. They are one and the same. Just as the love of God was made manifest for us in the flesh of Jesus and His self-sacrifice for us, so too our love for God is made manifest in our flesh and our self-sacrifice for our neighbor. Just as our outward sins reveal a diseased heart, so now our acts of love reveal a heart created new and right. The commandments are not rules that we have to obey, but are a record of how we love one another as Christ has loved us.9
In Jesus everything is turned upside-down. The Law still shows us our sin and rightly condemns us, but the life of Jesus in fulfilling the Law for us, and in suffering its condemnation for us, has provided for us all the blessings of God promised to those who keep the Law. By faith in Him, we receive not what we deserve, but the forgiveness, life, and salvation of our Savior.
So now pray with David, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” and then rejoice that our prayer is answered here, in the cleansing and renewing body and blood of Jesus in His Holy Supper. Here you are fed, you are strengthened, you are forgiven, you are filled with Christ and His Spirit. This is the same Jesus who served you on the cross, now serving you here with, and in, His Supper. The same Jesus, same forgiveness, same love, same life.
Amen.
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NOTES
1Deuteronomy 30:16
2Matthew 5
3Deuteronomy 30:10
4Psalm 51:10
5‘ex nihilo’ is Lain for ‘from nothing.’
6Ephesians 2
7Romans 5:8
8Romans 6:4
9John 13:34
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