Well, this year of 2001 will be behind us in just a couple of days. I think the events of September 11 and the ripple effects on the economy will etch this year in our memories for a long, long time. But apart from events outside of you, think about who you have been this year. How are you a different person today from who you were a year ago? Are you a deeper person? a more loving person? a wiser person? a more spiritual person?
How about a year from now? At the end of 2002, will you be a different person from who you are now? Will you be a deeper person? a more loving person? a wiser person? a more spiritual person?
I guess it was once common to make New Year’s resolutions this time of year. But my feeling is that people don’t bother so much anymore. Most talk about New Year’s resolutions is about how quickly they are forgotten and how ineffective they are.
I don’t want anyone feeling that they can’t grow deeper or wiser, or that those are things that just happen with time and can’t be hurried along. But we need to go deeper than just writing a list of new behaviors we are going to start in the new year. We need to get to the heart of change and spiritual growth.
And so, this morning I want to look at a passage from the Sermon on the Mount from Luke’s gospel that gives a very important key to how good things come about in our lives. We’ll read it in a moment, but let me tell you the answer first, the real key to change in our lives is that it all starts in our hearts. Develop a good heart and you’ll be a good person.
Now read with me our text, Luke 6:43-45. It’s printed in your bulletin.
"43 No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; 44 for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. 45 The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks."
Being a good person, the person God wants you to be, is a matter of the heart. And I think there is a deep desire in all of us that we don’t want to be just going through the motions of life. We want to be deeply connected, to feel with what we are doing, to really value the things that are good, to really care. Those are all matters of the heart. We want to live from the heart.
And, of course, when the Bible talks about “heart” it isn’t referring to that pump in our chests that keeps the blood flowing. It is talking about something much deeper, and harder to define. It is the core of who you are, the source of emotions and desires, passion, understanding. Heart is a word we use for the deepest sort of understanding, for heart to heart connections. It is in a healthy heart where we are able to connect with God. When our hearts are healthy, life is good.
The Bible describes all sorts of heart diseases. Let’s look at some of them.
In Proverbs 12:25 we read about an anxious heart. It says, “Anxiety weighs down the human heart.” We’ve had a pretty anxious year, haven’t we? And that’s a good description of what it feels like when you are anxious and worried? Your heart is weighed down, sluggish, it doesn’t respond well. If you are worried about your health or getting the bills paid or your kids or a strained relationship, your brain may be so busy trying to process just one or two anxious issues that there just isn’t much brain power left for anything else. It is not going to produce much fruit. An anxious heart is just too weighed down. It needs care.
Proverbs 25:20 talks about the effect of grief on the human heart. “Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the human heart.” Those of us who have experienced a major grief know what it does to your heart. There is an empty spot there, no less real than the hole a moth chews in a woolen blanket or worms burrow into wood. For a while after a grief you just don’t have the emotional strength you would normally have. That makes it especially important to take care of a grieving heart and nurture it so that it can become strong again.
The Bible speaks many times of hard hearts, proud hearts or rebellious hearts. That’s when you know there is something God is calling you to do or something for you to stop doing. And you are being stubborn about it. It’s not so important whether it is a big thing or a little thing. The important thing is who it is you are saying no to, and that’s to God. Whatever personal idolatry we may choose to put above obeying God, it will poison your heart, hardening it against hearing God’s voice. That is serious heart disease. Spiritually, it is fatal. A heart that has been hardened against God is just plain not going to produce obedience to God or love for God. Just like thorn bushes don’t produce figs and grapes don’t grow on bramble bushes. If your heart is hardened against God, determined to stay in the driver’s seat and in control at all costs, there will not be good fruit of obedience to God in that life.
Then, in Matthew 13:15, Jesus speaks of a dull heart. Maybe it isn’t yet hardened into stone. It’s just dull and unresponsive. I wonder how much that describes our society today, a dull heart.
I put on the back page of your bulletin two classic poems that describe this problem. I’ll read them, but have them in the bulletin so that you can take them home and think about them. The first one is from William Wordsworth.
"The World is too much with us: late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.”
Isn’t that powerful? Isn’t it sad, not to be able to be moved by the beauty of nature? That’s one of the symptoms of a dull heart.
Or listen to this portion from Edna St. Vincent Millay.
"The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by."
A live heart has no limits of joy and wonder. It surveys all of creation and God’s face shines into it. But a dull heart brings a narrow, dull, life. How sad when that happens. How easy it is for our hearts to get battered and trampled by the world around us until they are that dull.
And there are all sorts of things that dull our hearts. We are bombarded by the promises of advertisers that life will be better if we buy their products, and we can run ourselves ragged to earn the money to buy the things, but material things can’t satisfy the deepest longings of our hearts. So we get jaded and give up hope.
Someone works very hard in the church with high hopes of making a difference for God. But something happens. They get criticized unfairly or unkindly. People who are supposed to be backing them up drop the ball. They get frustrated and disillusioned. And the day comes when they just don’t find it in them to extend themselves anymore.
Stress and trying to do too many things at once are guaranteed to wear our hearts down in time. Eventually the day comes when we just don’t find it in us to respond to family members or to God, because our hearts are just dulled by so many worries.
We watch on TV one human disaster after another. Today it’s in Afghanistan. In the past few years it has been East Timor, Guatemala, Sudan, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Somalia. Who knows where it will be next month. And it’s hard to keep your heart soft, to really care about one crisis after another when it feels like you can’t do anything about it anyway. And so we let our hearts grow dull and uncaring.
It is our hearts that determine our actions. And so if we want to be new people, then what we need to do is nurture our hearts. And when our hearts are healthy, then all sorts of good things flow naturally out of good hearts, just like healthy fig trees naturally produce sweet figs and healthy grape vines naturally produce juicy grapes.
So, what shape is your heart in today? As you’ve gone through one stress test after another in the past year, what have those stresses shown about the health of your heart? How have you done? Has your heart been up to the challenges? Or does it need some therapy?
And if your heart needs strengthening, what medicine is available for spiritual heart therapy? How can we develop strong hearts, spiritually?
One of the best therapies is the therapy of the Sabbath, times of rest, to stop skimming over the surface of life and let our hearts catch up and experience the life we are living. The Bible tells us to take one day in seven to catch up with God, with family, with our body’s need for rest. A Sabbath is your time to study the Bible for yourself, to teach yourself the vocabulary of the Spirit, to let God’s word wash your mind clean, to sharpen your focus on God as we worship together, to hear the still, small voice of God. The Sabbath is one of God’s main heart therapies.
But God’s heart therapy goes a lot farther than slowing us down and pulling us out of the world. God’s goal is to send us back into the world, as agents of healing for all his children. Our second scripture lesson was the Apostle Paul’s incredible words, describing the difficulties he faced in his ministry. He went through incredible obstacles for the sake of Christ: ship wreck, time in prison, poverty, exhaustion, beatings, all for Christ, all so that as many people could hear the good news of Christ as possible.
What a heart Paul had that he could do such things, and do them from the heart. I’m sure he didn’t always feel happy about what he went through. I’m sure he wasn’t calm and rested every day. In fact he said that he felt “afflicted in every way, but not crushed, perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” What a heart Paul had, to keep going to city after city to give people the wonderful gift of the good news about Jesus Christ even when it cost him so much. How could such good works flow out of an ordinary human heart?
And the answer is that this isn’t ordinary. God does extraordinary things through his children. And that takes more than just taking your rest when you start to get stressed. It takes an entire heart transplant. And that’s what the prophet Ezekiel talked about in our first lesson, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you… and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”
The strongest, healthiest heart is the result of God’s heart transplant. It comes when we let go of the controls and we ask God to enable us to love the things that he loves and hate the things that he hates, to guide our hands to operate as his hands and our mouths to speak as his mouth. Sometimes it happens all at once. More often it happens gradually as the result of many, many times of letting go of the controls and choosing to do things God’s way. And one day you realize that God’s heart is being expressed through you.
God’s Spirit can make us new. And it starts in the heart. And its nothing we can manufacture on our own. It is a gift from the loving heart of God.
