I begin this morning with this question…
(Slide 1) How healthy is your heart? I am speaking on two levels right now – the physical and the spiritual.
What do you know about your heart? That is, your physical heart?
From the Texas Heart Institute’s website, we learn the following about our human heart.
(Slide 2) It weighs between 7 and 15 ounces (16 ounces is one pound.)
(Slide 3) It is the size of our fist (Make a fist.)
(Slide 4) For a person who lives a long life it will beat up to 3.5 billion times.
(Slide 5) It pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood daily. (Now let’s see, gas is around $2.60/gallon and so 2,000 gallons at $2.60/gallon would be $5,200.00/day!)
What is required to keep this vital organ healthy? I checked several well-known websites and they said the same thing.
(Slide 6) Eat right and exercise.
Yet, there is another heart we need to care for just as much as our physical heart. It is our ‘spiritual’ heart. That part of us, which influences our decisions, values, and beliefs. Jesus had much to say about this heart.
In Mark 7:20-23 “It is the thought-life that defiles you. For from within, out of a person’s heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, eagerness for lustful pleasure, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness.”
When we began this series, we stopped at Matthew 22 where Jesus responds to a leading question, ‘“Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” with a declaration about loving God with our heart, mind, soul, and strength and neighbor as self.
How do we, to extend this analogy (refer to slide 6) for our spiritual heart?
(Slide 7) I suggest this morning that we eat right by asking and allowing God to use the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the all-important fellowship of the church to help us ‘eat right.’
Last July Newsweek magazine published an article entitled, ‘What Works.’ In the article, reporters Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert presented the findings of three of the ‘latest, greatest’ diet studies. What did they reveal about how to lose weight?
Keep a food diary. The article reported a study done by Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research that found that ‘diarists actually doubled their weight loss. Not only do they see how much they are eating, they also can spot problem areas…’
Deal with ‘weekend weakness.’ A study by Washington University indicated that Saturdays were difficult for a group of dieters. The suggestions offered to help combat the increased weekend food and calorie intake included weighing yourself daily and eating healthy before attending a party or other event where food is served.
Workplace weight loss programs. The article indicated that the ‘American Journal of Health Promotion found that work-based weight-loss programs were effective. In general, participants lost an average of 2.2 pounds to almost 14 pounds. Workplace programs also offer the advantage of a built-in support group since most employed adults spend almost half their waking hours at work. Many offer incentives to the most successful losers.’
How many here this morning have found or heard that being involved with tracking your eating, dealing with those challenging moments when eating is easy, and being a part of a support group has made weight loss easier?
Does not the same hold true in dealing with our inner heart or soul?
If we are to develop heart healthy habits so that our faith grows and we love God and self and neighbor in the Biblical way, do we not need to:
(Slide 8) Keep track of our spiritual diet by making the Bible a daily part of that diet?
In Hebrews 4:12 we read, “For the word of God is full of living power. It is sharper than the sharpest knife, cutting deep into our innermost thoughts and desires. It exposes us for what we really are.” That is a very potent statement!
But, if we want to know God’s will and seek guidance for our lives, if we want to have a healthy heart and thus a healthy love, the Bible must be a part of our daily life. We need to read, daily; think on it, daily; for God to use it to take root.
Now there are many good books to help us grow in our faith. And there are many good books that are interesting and helpful to read. But if we seek to develop and maintain spiritual heart health, the Bible needs to be a part of our daily ritual.
In doing so, God will help us keep track, if you will, of our what we are spiritually consuming that is not good for us to consume.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. It is the day that the Holy Spirit came, as Jesus said that He would, and filled those Jesus had told to wait with the power to proclaim the gospel message. Allowing the Holy Spirit to work in, through, and on us is another important way of developing a heart healthy faith and love. His power and presence is essential, very essential in the development of our soul.
This leads me to ask do we not need to:
(Slide 9) Ask the Holy Spirit to empower us and help us overcome our inner ‘weekend weaknesses?’ We have not just weekend weaknesses but weekday weaknesses, don’t we? We have weak moments, when we falter and fail in our walk with God, don’t we?
This is where the Holy Spirit comes in. He is present to not only convict us of our sins but to help us get back up and move forward again!
Do you also know that the Holy Spirit is one of our biggest prayer supporters? How many here this morning know this?
(Slide 10) Romans 8:26 and 27 says this, “And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don’t even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father who knows all hearts knows what the Spirit is saying, for the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.”
Please notice the italicized phrases… (Slide 11)
the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand the implications of this passage. For many years, I thought of the Holy Spirit as “the Big Gun of the Trinity.”
If God the Father could not get to me through His majesty and power and if Jesus could not get to me through His upcloseness, then the Holy Spirit was called in for a ground attack mission! And this does happen sometimes because of our stubbornness and willful disobedience.
But what Paul writes in these verses gives us a bigger picture of the Holy Spirit. He is the counselor as Jesus says in John 14:16. The Greek word in that verse is paraclete which also means ‘advocate, comforter, and encourager.’ The Holy Spirit becomes our cheerleader!
(Slide 12) the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. This moves me to tears. The Holy Spirit prays for me and for you and for us in ways that cannot be expressed in words! What does that do to you? Think of what it does for us!
The Holy Spirit goes to God on our behalf with a deep groaning; a deep passion; a deep longing that God’s will is done in, through, around, and to us! Why? Because He is our encourager our advocate! Such prayerful intervention cannot, with our obedient cooperation, but help us overcome our heart weaknesses!
I believe that when we come to a place in our praying that we cannot put it into words, we need to start praying, ‘Holy Spirit pray for me because I cannot pray right now.’ When we do, I believe that the Spirit goes to bat for us and for those we are praying for but we need to watch out!
(Slide 13) the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God’s own will.”
There is a point to this praying, this intercession; it is for us to be in harmony with God’s own will. The operative word here is ‘God’s.’ To overcome our ‘weekend weaknesses’ is God’s will for us. It is not often our own will; our own desire until we are in enough inner pain that we want to change. The purpose of the Holy Spirit praying for us is so that we are in line with God’s will and not our own.
Notice also that Paul does not use singular pronouns in this statement like ‘I,’ or ‘me.’ He uses a plural pronoun ‘us’ to signify that this harmony is about ‘us’ the church and not just ‘me.’ This brings me then to the suggestion if we are to develop heart healthy habits so that our faith grows and we love God and self and neighbor in the Biblical way, do we not need to
(Slide 14) Attach ourselves to a local church as our support group?
Now I have not watched The Biggest Loser on a regular basis but when I have, you don’t have long to watch before you realize, especially during the weigh-in at the end of the show, just how much bonding has taken place in those groups. I don’t think that it is made up TV drama.
Those individuals have put their heart and soul into losing weight that has crippled them physically, emotionally, relationally, and mentally. Their stories of triumph are moving.
The same holds true for the church. We are in need of a spiritual weight loss program. We are in need of confession and repentance of losing weight, as we read in Hebrews 12:1 by stripping of “every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress.”
Remember last week what Chaplain Smith said about bearing one another’s burdens. We are to do so gently while remaining responsible for our own. Yet, how can we bear one another’s burdens when we are weighed down by our own?
How many of those people on The Biggest Loser lost their weight by themselves? None of them! They lost (and sometimes gained) as part of a team.
Think for a moment about someone who has recovered from drug addiction. Did they do it on their own? Probably not. They had help. They had a group to go to and a sponsor to help them.
They also had to face their burdens, sometimes called their character defects, right? These are the weights in Hebrews 12:1 that slow us down in believing, trusting, and loving. Things like: shame, impatience, perfectionism, anger, rage, lust, self-pity, resentment, jealousy and the like.
Someone once said, ‘there is no such thing as solitary Christianity.’ But it seems to me that we like to practice it.
As we read the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, there is a balance, I believe, between our God given individual choice to accept or reject God’s saving grace through Christ and the need for joining other believers to grow in that faith. We need both. We need the Lord’s wonderful forgiveness through His grace, mercy, and love, and we need to intentionally to enter into a relationship with a carefully chosen group of believers that will help us shed this inner weight. We cannot lose it on our own we need safe people who will help us take it off and keep it off.
(Slide 15) So what does all of this mean for us this morning?
Let us go to main text this morning, 1 Corinthians 13:7.
(Slide 15a) Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
This is a heart healthy love. This is love tracked by daily Bible reading; renewed through prayerful and intentional surrender to the Holy Spirit; and cultivated by intentional and responsible accountability to a carefully chosen group of believers.
(Let me share a good working definition of accountability. It is not being treated as a witness in a courtroom. Effective accountability comes when we say, “I need to work on _______, and this is what I intend to do, please ask me how I am doing on this.”)
In this heart healthy love, we read of endurance, hope, and faith because this heart healthy love is rooted in the love of God and the love of God is rooted in the character of God.
If then, we call ourselves, ‘Christian,’ this love must become our daily practice because to love as Jesus would have us love requires a healthy and getting healthier heart.
So then, how do we assess, that we are developing heart healthy habits that lead to a vital and helpful faith in Christ?
Let me share the story of “Hank” (not his real name) as told by John Ortberg.
“Hank,” according to Ortberg, “was a cranky guy.’ He hardly smiled and when he did it was often a crooked kind of a smile that was at the expense of someone else. “Hank” was not an affirming kind of a guy says Ortberg and was a chronic complainer.
One time he complained about how loud the music was in worship and eventually called OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and complained to them that resulted in their visiting the church!
But Ortberg also says something that I think we need to take a moment to process. Hank went to church his entire life and no one expected him to change. He notes that the church had some expectations and beliefs for Hank and the rest of the church (i.e. membership) to follow but that no real level of personal transformation seem to be expected of Hank.
That is sad. That is tragic. That is not Biblical!
Out of that story, Ortberg asks five questions for his readers to consider as they assess their faith and the need for personal transformation that faith requires.
(Slide 16) Am I spiritually inauthentic?
In other words, do I appear to be more spiritual, more Christian than I really am? A little boy was asked in Sunday school what is brown, furry, has a long tail, and stores nuts for the winter.’ ‘I guess the answer is Jesus,’ he said, ‘but is sure sounds like a squirrel to me!’
Are you tired of the ‘Jesus’ answer and instead are longing to answer how you really feel and what your really think about your inner life?
Am I becoming judgmental or exclusive or proud? I’ll let you in on a little secret, okay? You promise not to tell okay? Ready? Can you handle it?
Preachers do a great deal more of comparing themselves to other preachers than they will publicly admit to!
Pride is a big problem for those of us who call ourselves Christian. Once we think we have the answer we become smug and think we have arrived. Is this a heart healthy attitude?
Am I becoming more approachable, or less? Is my relationship with God attracting or repealing people? Are people being drawn to God because of me or not?
Am I growing weary of pursuing spiritual growth? Do you ever get weary of the faith and all the expectations that come with being a Christian?
Am I measuring my spiritual life in superficial ways? How do we do that? By the number of verses we memorize or how many ‘quiet times’ with God we do on a weekly basis? Or how many times we get to worship on a monthly basis? Is this the true measurement of spiritual health and life?
Ortberg cuts to the chase and asks, “Am I growing in love for God and people? Because he goes on to say,” the real issue is what kind of people we are becoming.”
This is your assignment for this week: (Slide 17) Ask yourself this question for the rest of your life…Am I growing in love for God and others or not? Act accordingly and do what is right.
All of us are in danger of becoming like Hank: lifeless, joyless, and loveless. Make the determination to become like Jesus – individually and congregationally again and again and again. Let us resolve to love with a healthy heart and sould. Amen.
Sources:
Bible References are NLT
Texas Heart Institute:
http://www.texasheartinstitute.org/HIC/anatomy/Anatomy.cfm
Newsweek article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/144958
Ortberg quotes are from his book The Live You’ve Always Wanted.
