THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Last Sunday, and again in our Wednesday evening Bible Study we began to explore the subject of what is going on in your heart.

We didn’t deal much with your cholesterol levels or whether you might have a mitrol-valve prolapse. We didn’t solve the issue of whether eating a high carb or a high protein diet is better for your heart. Though God cares deeply about what is going on in every part of your life there are certain aspects that he pays far more attention to than others .

The Bible hones in on the subject of your heart (900 times) but less than a handful of those times are referring to the organ inside your body. If that’s not the primary meaning then what is? According to the Bible:

Heart- “Your core“…. “Your inner being.”

We spent some time on Wednesday evening trying to decide whether your heart is the same as your soul (truth is the Bible uses the word soul to describe everything from you being a living person to something deep inside you…. We get our English word psyche/ Psychology from the NT word for soul) Same with the word Spirit… it’s a broad word that stretches from the fact that you’re breathing in air to the part of you that goes to heaven when you die. ( We get our English word pneuma/pneumatic from the NT word for soul)

The word heart, in the Bible, is not broad like soul and spirit. It is very specific….. more than 99% of the time it is talking about the same part of you. I spent a lot of time defining for you that it is not the same as you mind/ intellect… so what is it?

Who are you in your core? If you could peal back all the layers of your existence… peal off whether you are short or tall, skinny or plus sized, peal off whether others think you are pretty or homely. Skin back how big you brain is and how many folds have developed in your gray matter or whether its still smooth as a bowling ball. Peal off what % of body fat you have or don’t have, whether your veins are clogged with cholesterol or clean as a new pipe. Whether your skeleton is petite or you are “big-boned“.

When you get past all the other stuff that supposedly defines your existence and strip down to your core…. Who are you?

-the inner person …

-the hidden person of the heart

-the central essence of someone

- that part with which God is primarily concerned

We get through our day and look back evaluating it’s success. We landed a deal that increased our wealth. We are impressed… God… not so much. We found a huge sale and got a great Christmas gift for a family member a half the price. We’re excited! God is far more interested in what our attitude was with the clerk than in how much money we saved on the gift.

It would probably be fascinating to us if we could go through a weeks time and see a log of the items that we found to be the highlights of our week; and then listed them beside God’s list of what happened in our lives that was really eternally important.

We loved the movie… the little scuffle with the wife on the way to the movie was just a bother. God, on the other hand wasn’t impressed with the movie…at all… but took great interest in the heated exchange in the car with the wife.

We were satisfied with how quickly we made it to our destination through heavy traffic; God was more concerned with how we responded to the man who stopped short in front of us and the hand signals we used as we went past him.

We were satisfied that our neighbor got the message when we returned his garbage pails off our property and set them right behind his car where he would back over them in the morning… God does not give us the high five when we really, effectively, stick it to someone….. He’s concerned about the effect our actions have on the other person and even more concerned, for our sake, on what our actions are producing deep inside our core….our heart.

The huge challenge for us, is to get us as concerned as God is, about the eternal issues that are going on in are hearts… and to become appropriately unconcerned with the temporal things that go on in our daily lives. Obviously we are not going to be totally unconcerned with daily issues…. But if we could get a divine perspective about what things we should be giving our primary attention to and what things are just diversions..

I conducted a funeral yesterday and said what I almost always now say in each memorial. If this person could come back here and speak to us now (regardless of whether they are a believer or not) each would say the same thing: Stop focusing all you time and attention on things that are external and temporal and start giving primary attention to matters of the heart. If this life is really about preparing for the next life…. Then nothing else makes sense!!!

This verse really struck me fresh this last week and said something to me it has not said before:

What you are on the inside will eventually find it’s way out. I was fascinated by the storage concept. Your computer hard drive, at home, is a storage facility (of what the manufacturer put there) but also a compilation of what you thought important enough to store there. If one of the bright types here would take your hard drive, pull out of it everything you stored there and project it across the front of this room. We could probably, without ever knowing the name of who saved the material, come up with a pretty good picture of the personality and taste of the computers owner…. Based just on what was stored in memory by you….

Jesus, himself, is saying that the same thing is true on a life level with the storage facility of the heart. He gives this passage in Matthew 12 along with the picture of a good tree bearing good fruit and a bad tree bearing bad fruit.

Who you are is not just a product of who you have intellectually decided to be. The thoughts that flit through your head minute by minute are not a definition of who you are. Who you are is etched into the fabric of you core, deep in your heart!

If we life continuously sinful lives characterized by consistent sinful actions it is a symptom of the inner condition of our heart.

If you’re getting all bummed out about the condition of you heart, let me hasten to remind you that the deck against all of us is stacked. We don’t get 3 chapters into the Bible till mankind and women-kind has a full blown spiritual heart attack.

The evil one is also interested in the condition of your heart. He is not so interested in whether you do a good deed or a bad deed on ay giving day. He’s far more interested in corrupting your heart. He planted a spiritual virus deep in Adam and Eve’s hard drive and it continues to affect you and me right up to today. He spends all his time trying to build on that original corruption in your core, trying to get you to ignore the virus and believe that you can pull off a few good deeds and counterbalance the spiritual heart problem on the inside.

By the time we get six chapters into the Bible we clearly see the effects of his evil virus on the core of mankind.

This is the first mention that the God, in who’s image we are created… also has a heart… a core… an essence. And the message is quite clear:

When our hearts fell God’s heart broke!

I would go as far as to say, that the story of the Old Testament is the story of a broken hearted God. God ,obviously had a plan to transform the hearts of mankind and that plan was in place before he ever created us to start with, but when you read through the pages of the OT you see people who’s hearts are filled with satan’s virus of sin.

And you hear God’s prophet’s warning them that their hearts are corrupted:

Ezekiel 6:9 Then in the nations where they have been carried captive, those who escape will remember me—how I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts, which have turned away from me, and by their eyes, which have lusted after their idols. They will loathe themselves for the evil they have done and for all their detestable practices. (NIV)

And you hear God promising to turn their heart back to him:

Jeremiah 31:31-33 "The day will come," says the LORD, "when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. 32 This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife," says the LORD. 33 "But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel on that day," says the LORD. "I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. (NLT)

That’s a huge promise.. One that still applies to us today. Instead of trying to intellectually follow God’s plan for living. God promises to “write it on your heart”

Using the computer analogy again… do you remember when you had to enter a command for your computer to follow. Every step to a simple word processing document involved memorizing many commands which you had to feed the computer in just the right order.

Now you click your cursor on an icon and the page open up ready to type. Why. Because all of those commands have been written into the heart of the computer. It’s part of the computers core.

It’s not a perfect analogy: but that’s what God has promised to do in your heart.

Romans 10:9-10 That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. (NIV)

All of this comes down to the work of God on your behalf:

Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to this world, took on human, flesh, took on himself the sins of all mankind, took the punishment for our sins on himself, died in our place, faced head-on the forces of sin and death, defeated satan and hell and rose from the dead victorious over the grave…..

If you believe in your heart and embrace those truths;

(Hebrews 2:14-15) Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death-- that is, the devil-- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (NIV)

Conclusion: The Story of Christmas (C.S. Lewis who Chronicles of Narnia is being released by Disney this week)

I’m a strong believer in us fighting for the right to put up nativities in honor of Christ birth. I love taking my grandchildren to a living nativity. Are you holding on to your seat:

I’m not sure we are best served by that image. The image of a sweet helpless child in the arms of a beautiful young virgin girl leaves us feeling all warm inside…

What it doesn’t give us is the reality of what Jesus came to do. The only reason Jesus came as a baby was to live to adulthood so he could die in our place. The reason he died was so he could defeat death, conquer satan’s power over our hearts and set us free. He then rose from the dead, conquering death to pave the way to eternal life for us all.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Grand Miracle: paints Jesus Incarnation as a royal diver standing in the glistening sunlight above a dark lake. At the bottom of the lake is something that has been lost of great value. He takes off all his royal robes until he is left completely naked dives into the water. He swims down through the beautiful sparkling top waters. (that’s his birth) He continues to swim deeper and deeper until the lake becomes black and it’s difficult to see. Finally he’s at the bottom where it is pitch dark . He digs into the muck at the bottom into the worst possible places. Until he finally retrieves the prize. With his lungs ready to break, He swims back closer and closer to the surface and finally breaks through the top of the water holding in his hand the thing he went down to get… That thing was the key to freeing men and women’s hearts ( your heart and mine) from satan’s virus of sin.