Check Your Heart: What Jesus Really Demands of Us

Meta Description: Jesus didn't just command right behavior—He demanded a right heart. Discover what that means for your relationships, your marriage, and your walk with God. URL Slug: check-your-heart-kingdom-of-god Featured Image: A close-up of two open hands held out, slightly cupped, with warm natural light falling across them—conveying openness, surrender, and vulnerability before God.

Let me ask you something personal before we go any further: When did you last let God check your heart?

Not your behavior. Not your church attendance. Your heart.

This past Sunday, we continued our nine-week journey through the Sermon on the Mount, and I have to be honest with you—this was one of the harder messages I've had to preach. Not because the content is complicated, but because it's uncomfortably close. Jesus doesn't let us stay at the surface level of behavior. He goes straight for the heart. And that's exactly where we need Him most.

Jesus Didn't Come to Delete the Law—He Came to Fulfill It

Before Jesus gets into the hard stuff, He makes something crystal clear in Matthew 5:17–18:

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished."

This matters enormously. Jesus isn't tearing up the rulebook. He's becoming the fulfillment of it.

There's a crucial difference between trying to obey God's law and walking close to the God who gave it. As I said Sunday, it's really hard to violate God's word when you're walking with God. You don't keep His commands through sheer willpower and white-knuckle obedience. You keep them by staying in deep, devoted relationship with Jesus—the one who fulfilled every command perfectly on your behalf and paid the penalty when you didn't.

Tim Keller put it this way: religion says, "I obey, therefore I'm accepted." Christianity says, "I'm accepted, therefore I obey." That's the difference. We don't earn our way to God. We walk with the One who already made the way.

The Heart Behind the Commandment

In Matthew 5:27–28, Jesus turns to one of the Ten Commandments—one most people assume they've kept:

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."

Here's what stopped me as I was preparing this message: Jesus isn't lowering the bar. He's revealing where the real battle has always been fought—in the heart, not just in the bedroom.

Many of us can say, "I've never technically done that." But Jesus goes straight to the technically. He's not interested in technicalities. He's interested in your heart. And in the world we're living in right now—saturated with hookup culture, pornography, and the constant scroll of social media—this teaching has never been more relevant or more urgent.

Jesus follows this with what sounds like a shocking instruction: if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. I don't believe He's giving us a literal surgical prescription. He's giving us a principle: cut off anything that is your source of stumble, no matter how much it costs you. A flip phone over a destroyed marriage. A deleted app over a broken family. Whatever it takes.

Guard your heart. Guard your marriage. Keep the creepers out.

What God's Design for Marriage Actually Looks Like

Jesus then addresses divorce in Matthew 5:31–32, quoting Deuteronomy 24 and elevating what Moses had permitted as a concession back to God's original design:

"Everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery."

And in Matthew 19, He anchors it even deeper:

"Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, 'Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate."

I know this is difficult territory. Many of you have walked through divorce. Many of you are in second or third marriages. I'm not standing here to condemn you—I'm standing here as your pastor to tell you what Jesus says as king of this kingdom.

God's design is beautifully simple: if you're single, walk in purity and celibacy as you follow Christ. If you're married, be faithful and devoted to your spouse alone. Marriage is a covenant that reflects Christ and the church. Can you imagine Jesus cheating on His church? Neither should we ever go there.

To every married person reading this: fight for your marriage. Stop fighting your spouse. Forgive quickly. Fall in love again. Choose, out of reverence for Jesus, to fulfill the vows you made.

The Condition of Your Heart Before God

I started Sunday with a question, and I want to close with it here: what's the condition of your heart?

David prayed in Psalm 139: "Search me, O God, and know my heart." I've had that verse as the opening screen on my phone for the past couple of months because I need to see it constantly. I need that reminder. We all do.

You can fake it with everyone around you. You cannot fake it with Him.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the law. He walked close to God perfectly so that by His Spirit, we could walk close to God too. The goal isn't to bootstrap your way into holiness through rule-keeping. The goal is to stay so close to Jesus that your heart simply doesn't want to go to those dark places.

My hope for all of us—including myself—is that we would stop asking, "How much can I get away with?" and start asking, "How do I stay close to Jesus?"

Because in staying close to Him, we fulfill the law. We love God. We love people. And we live like the kingdom people He's called us to be.

If this message stirred something in your heart, don't sit with it alone. Watch the full message online, and reach out to someone on our pastoral team. We'd love to walk with you.

Social Media Excerpt (Facebook/Instagram): Jesus didn't just command right behavior—He demanded a right heart. In our latest sermon from the Sermon on the Mount, we unpacked what it really means to check your heart when it comes to lust, marriage, and walking close to God. This one hits different. Watch or read it now. 🔗

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