Deuteronomy 30
What Are You Capable Of?

I. What Can You Do?
1. Can you run a small business, cook good Chinese food, practice medicine; play musical instruments?
2. Running a restaurant seems easy for those who’ve never tried it. The hardest is the restaurant work.
3. Things that are harder than they appear: comedy, cooking, surfing; playing a musical instrument, etc.
4. Somethings look hard but with enough practice, enough training, time and exertion, you could do it.
5. Some things require talent, skill, ability. “You can’t put in what God left out.”
6. I could have learned Mandarin if I was taught it as a small kid but now I couldn’t get good at it.
7. Arminianism says that you are capable of whatever God commands. Matthew 5:48 says, “be perfect.”
8. An obstacle course in the military shows the new trainees that they are incapable of finishing it.
9. What if the purpose of God’s commands is to get you to know that you aren’t capable?
II. The Heart (30:1-10)
A. The Problem of the Heart
1. What you are capable of depends on your heart. The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.
2. God wants complete, loving, eager, unreserved, heart-felt obedience. Are you capable of that?
3. If you can’t be perfect, from your heart, there’s judgment. Judgment makes you aware of your sin.
4. John 16:8 says the Holy Spirit convicts people of “sin, righteousness, and judgement.”
5. We require the Holy Spirit. By themselves, people aren’t capable of knowing or doing right.
6. Augustine, “Lord, You command self-control. Grant what you command, command what you will.”
7. Pelagius claimed that people were using what Augustine said is their inability to not try to obey.
8. The Lord Jesus finished Matthew 5 by telling us to “be perfect” to show us that we’re not capable.
B. Circumcision of the Heart
1. You turn from your sin. The Lord restores you. He has compassion on you. He gathers His elect.
2. Matthew 24:31 says God will send His messengers to gather His elect from all over the world.
3. “If your outcasts are in the uttermost part of the heaven” — in they’re in America or China (30:4).
4. He’s taken care of the heart of the problem by taking care of the problem of the heart.
5. The true, spiritual mark of the covenant, marking you off as His people, is circumcision of the heart.
6. God will take out the heart of stone and replace it with a living heart of flesh that now loves God.
7. “The Lord your God will” give you the new mark of the covenant. God does it because we can’t.
8. He has commanded us to love Him with all our heart and promised to grant what He commands.
9. Baptism is not the sign of the new covenant. Colossians 2:11-12 says, “In Him you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by the circumcision of Christ.”
10. Baptism is the sign of having received the circumcision of the heart. It’s the sign of the sign.
11. The Lord does what we’re not capable of then gathers us together from all peoples in the world.
12. The Lord takes great pleasure in blessing us, enriching us, healing us, raising us from the dead, etc.
III. The Work (30:11-14)
2. “This commandment” — to love the Lord — is “not too hard for you, neither is it far off.”
3. He’s given to some a circumcision of the heart, so that the Word of God is in their heart, so they obey it.
4. What is the work? John 6:29, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.”
5. You aren’t capable of that unless you’ve been given a new heart; that the Lord has done the work.
6. If He has changed your heart, suddenly, it’s not hard at all. It’s not far off. It’s right within reach.
IV. The Choice (30:15-20)
1. The Lord set before us “life and good, death and evil.” God is not stopping people from believing.
2. If you want to follow Jesus, that’s because God gave you a heart to do so.
3. The choice: life or death. You choose. But people don’t have eyes to see what life is.
4. You obey by loving the Lord your God. Love, by definition, comes from the heart.
5. If we do what we naturally do and our heart turns away from the Lord, we’ve chosen death.
6. Since there are no other gods, the Lord calls the universe to witness this choice (30:19).
7. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life” that you may live.
8. You choose life by “loving the Lord your God” (30:20), holding your money loosely but God tightly.
9. Do that because “He is your life.” He’s the One who will give you “length of days,” eternal life.
V. Invitation: You are capable of choosing the Lord if the Lord has given you a new heart, eyes to see that He is your life, ears to hear His invitation: believe in Jesus, choose life. That’s your choice: life or death and He is your life. Now, choose wisely.