What Is Written On Your Heart

At the end of the service this evening, we're gonna go to the communion table. And one of the few places I think in existence today, there might be some others, I'm not aware of them, but where we can have communion together all around the world from as many as 211 countries tonight, that we can take the juice that represents the shed blood of Jesus Christ and the bread that represents his body that was given for us, and we can partake with thankful hearts, acknowledging this incredible life that God has given us through his son, Jesus Christ. It's wonderful, just to even picture in our minds that people in China tonight, people in the Philippines, people in Europe, Australia, in Central America and South America and Africa, we're all gonna be taking communion together at the very, very same time. If you have friends that don't have a place where they can have communion, or perhaps their church doesn't celebrate it anymore as happens in some cases, then invite them to join with us and be part of this prayer meeting in the evening and celebrate the Lord's Supper with us. Also, if you'll go to the website, it's time to pray, all one word, itstimetopray.org. You'll see all of the prayer requests that have come in from around the world. You can read them. You can see the answers to prayer. There's well over 16,000 answers to prayer there now. Some of them are astounding, wonderful answers. They'll encourage your heart as you read them. You can also either text or email in your own prayer request for yourself or your friends or your family. You can indicate if you're going to pray for somebody so they'll know that they're not standing out there all alone, but that you have joined with them and you have made the choice to pray with them. And so that's a very, very important thing. Also this evening, I'm gonna be giving you an opportunity to receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. And if you do that, if you receive him as Savior, we'll put a number on the screen, it's 51,000, and we ask you to text the word DECIDED to that number. And when you do, then there'll be a series of short videos that'll be sent to you explaining to you what the next steps are in your walk with God and how we as a church, Times Square Church, can help you in that walk. It's vitally important. And if you know any new believers who don't have any fellowship and they're not, they don't understand how to walk this walk with God, then you get them to text this number in. And I know I'm speaking tonight, even I was in Tanzania a couple of years ago, and we had a crusaded night with Nikki Cruz for young people who live on the street. And I talked to a lot of you and you have cell phones and you actually do come in and you don't attend the church, but you do come in and you partake of this prayer meeting. So you need to text that number in, Decided51000, and we'll send some videos to you and help you get started. There's some classes online and different things, and it will be a great, great blessing to you. So please text that in and let us know that you're out there so that we can help you in your walk with God. Now, I wanna speak tonight to people who are, you're tired of being where you are. You know what you should be, but you can't seem to find the strength to get there. And you're weary, you want to be a believer in Christ, or maybe you are already a believer, but you're not free. And you're very, very tired of this inner battle in your mind and in your heart, you know what kind of a life you should be living, how you should be giving to others, you should be an honest employee, you should be a loyal father and husband and such like, and you know what you should do, but you can't find the strength to do it, and you're tired of where you are and you wanna get out. So if you'll go with me to the book of Jeremiah chapter 31, that's where we're gonna begin this evening. And the title of the short sharing I have for you tonight is what is written on your heart? What is written on your heart? So Father, I thank you tonight, God, you really are, Lord, raising up an end time army. You really are. This is not just a hope in my heart. God, you have shown me something, I've seen it. I've seen it with my spiritual eye, and you've spoken it to my heart. And Lord, I thank you, God, that you are just unwilling to let your family be beaten on by darkness any longer. And I thank you that there are moments in history where you just say, enough, I've heard the cry, and I've come to set my people free. And so Lord, I thank you, God, I thank you for the marriages that you will heal, the children you'll bring home, the weak that will be made strong, the imprisoned that will be set free, the blinded will be given sight to see a way forward, those who have no resource, there'll be a revelation of the resource available through Jesus Christ. God, thank you, God, thank you, God, thank you. Lord, I ask you to fight for your people. Lord, my heart is broken by the close to 1,000 prayer requests that have come in today, and so many people are just losing heart. So many are being beaten up by darkness or by compromises they've made. And Lord, it's no honor to you that your bride is beaten on. I'm asking you to rise up as a mighty warrior and fight as the lion of the tribe of Judah for your people. Let your name be honored again in this generation, oh God, and let your praises be sung in every nation throughout the earth before you come for your church. And Father, I thank you and I praise you, God, for the anointing of your spirit on my life today. I yield my body to you, I yield my future, I yield everything I have to you for your glory. And I ask only, Jesus, that you would help your people. And I praise you and bless you in your precious name, amen. So what is written on your heart? Jeremiah chapter 31, beginning at verse 31. Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. And I will be their God and they shall be my people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor and every man his brother saying, know the Lord, for they shall all know me. From the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin will I remember no more. What an incredible passage of scripture. God says, I'm gonna make a new covenant with my people. In this case, it's Israel, but it does have an application as well to you and I who are the church of Jesus Christ, his body on the earth. Now in those days, when God brought his people out of captivity, he gave them in a sense rules, laws to obey so that they would be godly. He says, I want you to be, I'm gonna make this as simple as I can. I want you to be these kind of people. So he actually wrote the law. The first part of that law, of course, was the 10 commandments. And he wrote those commandments on tables of stone. So they were visible, but they were outside of our humanness or the humanness of the people at the time. And they were things that God said, this is what I want you to be as my people. I want you to be honest. I want you to have no other gods before me. I don't want you to commit adultery. I don't want you to kill. I don't want you to hate. I want you to be, I'm just paraphrasing, but I mean, I want you to be a forgiving people. I don't want you to covet your neighbor's goods. This is, I want you to be truthful. I don't want you to bear false witness against your neighbor. So this is what I'm asking you to be. I will be God to you, as he said to Jeremiah, I'll be your husband. You're gonna be my bride, but this is the kind of a bride I want. This is the kind of a people I want in the earth. Now, Paul, the apostle, speaks in Romans chapter seven of, I call it the old covenant dilemma. We saw outside of ourselves, in a sense, this law, this requirement that God had of us to be his people. And yet there was an inability inside of us to perform it. Paul says in Romans chapter seven, beginning at verse 14, he says, I know the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. But what I will to do, that I do not practice. But what I hate, that I do. Has anybody ever lived there? Is listening online, you know? I've been there, and you've been there. Before I came to Christ, I can't tell you the numbers of times at midnight on New Year's Eve, I made promises. I don't know who I made them to, I wasn't a believer, so God wasn't hearing my prayers back then. But I promised myself I'm gonna be a better this, and I'm gonna do better that, and I'm gonna change this and change that. And just like Paul said, I kinda knew what to do. I had an inner knowledge of, may I put it this way, of what God requires of us. We all do, we're all made in the image of God, and the presence of God is literally omnipresence in the world, so we have this kind of innate understanding of what kind of people we are to be. But I couldn't perform it, and it was so discouraging. You'd have to wait another year to make promises all over again, you still couldn't perform those. We know, he says the law is spiritual, but I'm carnal, I'm sold under sin. What I'm doing, I don't understand. But what I want to do, I don't practice, and what I hate, that I do. If then, he says in verse 16, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now it's no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know, Paul says, that in me, that is in my flesh, nothing good dwells. For the will is present. In other words, I want to do right, and I'm speaking to people tonight, that you don't want to be where you are. You want to be in another place, and you don't want to do what you're doing. You're tired of the depression, you're tired of the drugs, you're tired of the alcohol, you're tired of the adultery, you're tired of the pornography, you're tired of the addictions, you're tired of your own speech, you're tired of the way your mind works, you're just tired of this constant war inside against the ways of God, and you want out. But how to perform that which is good, he says, I just don't know how to do it. For the good that I will to do, I do not do, but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice. Paul says, now, if I do that which I will not to do, it's no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God, according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. And he concludes by saying, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Then thank God for verse 25, where he says, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So with my mind, I serve the law of God, but the flesh, the law of sin. And Paul says, I'm just so fed up. Now he's speaking of the human condition in Romans 7. I'm just so fed up of wanting to do good, but not finding the ability to do it. I'm tired of this, I'm tired of this. I want to be good, I want to be godly. I want to live life the way that God says that life should be lived. So how is this going to happen in my life? See, Paul says, thank be to God through Jesus Christ my Lord. Now remember, the promise that God made through Jeremiah is there's a day coming when the law will no longer be outside of you, the rules in a sense, or the things that you know you should do will no longer be outside. But I will come, and he said, I will write them on the table of your heart. That's incredible. The only way I can explain this is when we come to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, the third person of God, the Holy Spirit of God, comes and takes up residence inside this earthen body. And what he begins to do is he brings an eraser. I know I'm imagining this, but that's the way my mind works so you'll have to go with me on this one. And he starts to erase the former things that's on our heart, vengeance, grievances, old experiences we can't forgive, old habits we can't break, old comforts that promise comfort but they don't comfort. And he starts erasing these things off of our heart and he starts writing the law of God on our hearts. In essence, the law of God becomes part of our character. We no longer are trying to obey God just out of the sheer force of human will because Paul says we can't obey God that way but we begin to have this innate desire in our lives that God places there to do things that we've never considered before and it becomes part of our character. So in other words, we're not fighting against our nature to do it any longer. It becomes our nature actually to do these things. Let me give you an example. I was a brand new believer in Christ. And I was so excited about God, about this new life that God was about to, was giving me. And I just, I loved the word of God and I was delighting myself in the word of God. I started drinking whiskey, beer and whiskey when I was 13. Not a very good thing to do for young people but that's what I did and on a regular basis might I add. And now I'm in my 20s, I'm 24, I've come to Christ and I'm still drinking and I don't even see a problem with it. I see a problem with drunkenness but I don't see a problem with drinking. And so, no, I'd never heard a sermon on this topic at any time, nobody had ever spoken to me. Remember he said, nobody will have to teach you anymore. You will know God for yourself. So I remember on my way home, I'd worked a night shift, I'm in uniform, I go into this restaurant on the way home that had the best bacon and eggs and ham and home fries in the entire country as far as I'm concerned so I ordered my regular breakfast on the way home and I ordered a beer and I took out my Bible. So I got bacon, eggs, Bible and beer on the table all at the same time and I'm reading and I'm just so excited about the word of God and I have a sip of beer and take a little bit of eggs and a little bit of home fries. I didn't see any problem with any of this and then I started reading the word of God and that day, I'm reading where the angel came to Zachariah and Elizabeth and said, you're gonna have a son and this son is gonna be the forerunner to Christ. Of course, we know it was John the Baptist and the scripture says, he's going to turn many people away from iniquity and turn them towards living for God and then the scripture said, and wine will not touch his lips. Amazing and I remember thinking, I was sitting there at the table thinking, I want to be used of God. Now, I don't have any skill set. I couldn't speak in front of people. I wasn't a preacher. I'd never been to Bible school. I'm just starting to learn the scriptures by myself. I'm already working. I've already got a family. In my mind, it's too late to go back and be taught in college some of the things that I'm speaking about today but remember, the promise was, he'll start to write his law in your heart and God himself by the spirit will teach you and he will give you new desires. You know, the scripture says in Psalm 37 verse four, it says, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart and I see that two ways. There are godly desires when you delight yourself in God that he will actually grant to you but he will also give you the desires, new desires. You delight yourself in God. That's what happened to me that morning. I delighted myself in God and he gave me a new desire that I didn't have. I never had the desire to stop drinking. I just didn't. I didn't see any problem with it. I had the desire to not get drunk but I didn't have the desire to stop drinking but that morning, I read the word of God that God was going to cause a man to be born and this man would turn many to Christ, turn many to the ways of God and one of the qualifications of this man is that wine would never touch his lips and I remember thinking, I was sitting there saying, God, I want to be used of you. I want to be out of where I am and into where you're taking me to and I don't want anything in my life that's gonna hinder that purpose. You see, he was erasing the old things that were written on my heart and he was writing something new on my heart. That's what was happening. He was writing his law on the table of my heart and so nobody said, don't do this or your, there was no big grave warning. I'd actually never heard a message on it but the Holy Spirit put in my heart a new desire. I want to be used of God. I want my lips to turn people to Christ and I remember when I read it, I reached out, I put my hand on the glass of beer, I pushed it across the table. That's 42 years ago. I've never touched it since and had no desire to touch it at any time and God has used my lips to bring people unto himself. He put this new desire. You see, if you're still under the law, you're reading on these tables of stone out there, thou shalt not be a drunk, thou shalt not drink and so you're spending your whole time fighting not to do something but the desire inside is still to do it. No, God says, I'm gonna do it a different way. I'm gonna give you a new heart, a new mind, a new spirit, a new life, a new hope, a new future, new giftings of God. I'm going to take you places you could never go and give you things you could never possess. All I'm asking of you is delight yourself in me and I will give you new desires for your heart and then I will fulfill them. You know, I've had a lot of people over the years and it troubles me that Christian people want to go back to drinking. Under some guise of this is our newfound freedom in Christ. No, it's not freedom in Christ. You know, honestly, I've seen a lot of really good Christians turn back to alcohol. I don't know hardly any of them that are walking with God today and I've been at this a long time. New heart, new desires. A desire, he'll put in your heart a desire to forgive and it will be in your heart. It will be not outside of you with God asking you to perform it without the strength to do it. It will be through Christ, through the spirit of God. That's why the scripture tells us for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. Coming to Christ and the Holy Spirit now coming into my life, he has given me new desires. He has not only given me the desire, he has given me the power to walk in this newness of life. If the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead be in you, he who raised Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal body. God will give you strength that you don't naturally have. On your part, what does he require? Ask for it. I want to live for you, Lord. I wanna serve you, I want my life to count. I don't wanna live my whole life just seeing how close I can get to the fire without getting burned. I wanna live close to the throne of God. I wanna have the power to be given for the sake of others. I want fresh vision every day. I want to see the strength of my God that's given to me in the word of God. I want to serve you, God. I want to love you. I want to walk with you and I want to be used of you as a healing oil for the sake of others, as a key to unlock their prison doors, as a salve that will give their eyes sight to see their way out of their present blindness. Jesus Christ said, a tree is known by its fruit and out of the treasure of a good heart, the mouth will start to speak and this is what God will do if you will let him write his law upon your heart. Your mouth will start to agree with the ways of God. You will start to speak about yourself what God is speaking. I'm not an addict anymore, I'm an evangelist. I'm not destined to live my life in captivity. Not only am I gonna be free, I'm gonna take hundreds with me into freedom. Amen. You start speaking what God is speaking and you do it as you allow him to write his law on your heart. On the day of Pentecost, there was 120 people who had really, really tried their best to serve God. They tried, John had his head on the very heart of Jesus, listening to his heartbeat, loving him but when push came to shove, he fled from the garden naked. Peter wanted to fight to the death but he ran out of gas, he ran out of natural strength and he could say like, Paul, the thing I wanted to do, I ended up a coward, I ended up denying I knew Christ even to a little girl around a bonfire. I didn't even have the courage to stand and tell a little girl that yes, I am a follower of Christ and I do know him. And there they were and suddenly the Holy Spirit came and as the scripture said, when God comes, he comes with a pen and he starts rewriting the law of death as Esther once did into a law of life. He starts rewriting your future, he rewrites your character is rewritten. You become a new person in Christ, that's what it means to be born again. It's like the old you dies and a new you is born with new hopes and new dreams and new aspirations and new powers, new ability, a new calling, a new future, one that glorifies God and this whole kingdom is animated by the power of God from within you, not trying to serve God who's without which as Paul says, none of us can do it, we can't. That's why Paul ended up saying, I'm convinced that in me dwells no good thing apart of course from Christ, he knew that. And so the question I guess is what's written on your heart? Are you willing to let God erase it? Have you invited Christ first of all into your life? You see, you can't have this new heart without Jesus Christ having washed away your sin. You can't have this new heart without the Holy Spirit now taking up his residence inside your earthly body and beginning to erase the old issues of your heart and start to write this new law of life in Christ Jesus inside of you. This is a supernatural kingdom and when God's presence comes into your life, you are supernaturally raised from the dead and out from the power of death and the penalty of sin and you are brought in to this brand new life that God has for you in Jesus Christ. You become a new creation. Your whole life is being lived now by the power of God for the purposes of God and for people who yet still need to know God. It's a wonderful life to live. You begin to know that God is real. You don't have to tell people, your whole life tells them. Your whole being is an expression of the reality of God and the power of God and the forgiveness of God being lived out inside of you. So what's on your heart? Well, you see the scripture makes it clear. Jesus said it clear, whatever's on your heart will start coming out of your mouth. That's what happened on the day of Pentecost. These failures that I spoke about in this upper room, suddenly having received Christ as their savior, suddenly the Holy Spirit comes on them, they step out of the upper room and they just start agreeing with God. It's no more complicated than that. They were speaking of the things that God had done and was going to do in their lives and for whoever would turn to him and they were doing it with a supernatural empowerment of God that the whole of that society around them saw and bent their knee to. I think it's time for many who are listening tonight online to stop trying to serve God in your own strength and let God serve himself through you. May I put it that way? Let God do what he wants to do. It's time to stop resisting God and stop trying to justify wrong and calling it right and let him put a new law in your heart. You, as I pushed that beer away from me for the rest of my life, there's things in your life that you can push away from you too. You can push bitterness away. You can, there's a lot of things as you read the word of God that God will give you the power to push it across the table and never touch it again. I'm done with depression. I'm done with being beaten up in my mind. I'm done with the devil rubbing my face in my old failures and sins. I'm done living here. I'm a new creation in Christ Jesus and you start to speak with your mouth what God is doing in your heart. And glory to God, what a life it is when Christ comes into your life and you begin to live for him according to his will and according to his power. Now you can't do this. You can't do this until you've opened your heart and asked God to forgive you, even to forgive you for trying to be good and failing. Say, God, forgive me. I can't save myself. I can't change myself. I can't be a better person without, I've tried and I just get worse. It's not working for me or for my family. You just simply admit that you need a savior. I need you to save me. Don't make it any deeper than that. Don't make it complicated. It's actually quite simple. I can't save myself. I can't go to heaven in my own strength. I can't even live as a Christian in my own strength. I can't change, you know, there's a proverb says that a leopard can't change its spots. Try all you want. Can't change what you are. So I've tried, I can't. I progressively get worse. Only you, I need to be born again. Believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay the price for your wrong, to pay the penalty for your failure. And actually to create an entrance for you into a brand new life with God at the very center of your heart. Admit you're a sinner, believe that Christ died in your place and start confessing with your mouth that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior. And part of that confession is, it's not just running around going, Jesus is my Lord. That's great, that's great, right? Remember he said in the Bible, why do you call me Lord and don't do the things I do? In other words, I wanna do the things I do. I wanna do things through you. I wanna write my laws in your heart. I wanna be God to you. So don't just run around just saying I'm Lord. Let me be Lord. Let me guide your life. Let me rewrite your future. Let me govern and guide all that's going to be done because the Bible says, whatever is written on your heart, you will confess with your mouth. May I encourage you, sir, ma'am, tonight, would you stop declaring that you are what you ought not to be? Would you start declaring who you are in Christ? Would you start delighting yourself in the Lord and let him give you new desires for your heart? New desires. You'd be amazed. You know, he is most glorified by taking us in our weakest area and using that for his glory. Not in our strength. He's not glorified there because we will always touch the glory. And we'll always say, look what Jesus and I did. But he'll take you in the weakest area of your life. And you know that only God could have done this. You might be the nastiest person in your whole town, but he'll take you and suddenly there'll be a kindness and love in your heart. And you'll be just like Ebenezer Scrooge when he got converted in the Charles Dickens story. And you'll be suddenly just loving everybody and giving and people are looking. He took you in your weakest area and became your strength. That's most often how God is glorifying. So I'm gonna ask you before we go to the communion table tonight, because you shouldn't take communion if you're not a believer in Christ. The Bible warns against that. Don't claim that you belong to God if God doesn't belong to you. You have to open your heart. You have to believe that he died in your place and confess him with your mouth as Lord and Savior and start to walk this new pathway and this new journey. This is part of, you're going to be part of the end time army that God is now raising up in the earth. There's gonna be a shout of glory to Christ in this last day and your voice is gonna be counted in among them. I promise you this in Jesus' name. I'm gonna ask everybody here to pray with me and everybody online to pray this simple prayer with me. Before we prepare to go to the communion table. Lord Jesus Christ, I love you and I thank you for loving me. I thank you for dying in my place, paying the price for my wrong so that I could be the person that you've called me to be. That you've called me to be. And then when it's all over, I can know that heaven will be my home. So I invite you into my life. I invite you to forgive me and rewrite my future in my heart. From this day forward, you are my Lord, you're my Savior and you are my God. By your power and by your mercy, I will walk with you. I will be everything that you say that I am. Give me a heart to agree with your word and to always say yes to. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for saving me. And making me a child of God. And making me a child of God. In Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. If you just did that, I want you to text in the word decided to 51000. That's your first step of faith now. That's the first thing to do. Text the word decided 51,000. This is the beginning of an incredible journey in your life. Love you, thank God for you tonight. We're gonna come back and take communion together and we're gonna celebrate you tonight. I know there are people online that have come to Christ and so we're gonna take communion and we're gonna celebrate you tonight. God's making you part of his household, his family. In Jesus' name. Be back with you in just a moment. Amazing love.