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Ever since I was diagnosed and the possibility of a
heart transplant arose, there has been something weighing heavily on my
mind. Simply put, it is that for me to receive a new heart, someone else
has to die.
I was discussing this
with one of my fellow pastors here in town, and he shared with me an
insight that made all the difference for me: “Someone died so that all
of us might live.”
That sums up the heart
of Christ, that he would die so that sinners, those who had rejected
him, despised him, abused him, would be able to share eternity with him.
And the imitation of that perfectly beautiful heart is what I want to
talk about today.
What I’m going to say is
going to be push us a little bit and challenge us all, and before I
start with that I want you to listen carefully to the words of God this
morning: “Fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your
God. I will strengthen you. Yes, I will help you. Yes, I will uphold you
with the right hand of my righteousness.” Those are words from the Book
of Isaiah, written more than 3,000 years ago, yet they are being spoken
right here to us all..
That’s his promise to
all of us, and we only have to accept his promise and claim it for
ourselves.
God’s word says “Perfect
love casts out fear,” and my dear friends, I’m here to reassure you that
God loves all of us with perfect love. If we love him in return, then
our fears must vanish. I want you to cling to that idea now
I know that many of us
have cardiac problems of one kind or another, and I don’t want to make
light of that, but did you know that the Bible says that all of us, all
of humanity, are born with a bad ticker, with a malfunctioning heart?
Let me quote a couple passages that underscore that idea.
In the Book of Jeremiah
we read, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately
wicked. Who can know it?” Proverbs 28 says, “He who trusts his heart is
a fool, but whoever walks wisely will be delivered.” In other words, our
own hearts betray us, for they lead to physical pain and spiritual pain.
Everybody knows what I mean by physical pain, but the spiritual pain is
the slow strangulation of our hearts by sin, doubt and disbelief.
That sounds like a
one-way ticket to despair. But there is Jesus, who called himself the
Great Physician. He knew that the key to living an abundant Christian
life was the heart. He said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they
shall see God.” Another way to translate pure in heart might be,
“healthy heart,” while the opposite is a sick heart. And the only way to
fix a sick and stiff heart is with a heart transplant.
In our spiritual life,
if our heart is sick, our whole life, physical and emotional is also
affected. In 1982, Barney Clark became the first patient to receive an
implant of the Jarvik mechanical heart. He went on to live 112 days with
this device. When Clark woke up after the operation, his wife was there
to ask him an important question—“Do you still love me?” And he answered
“yes.” She had feared that somehow with this machine in his chest he
wouldn’t be able to love her with his whole heart. Nevertheless, it’s
true that if our heart is spiritually sick, it totally gets in the way
of the love that we owe God, and each other.
So how do we get a
healthy heart? How do we get a heart that, in the words of the
Beatitudes, is pure? I’m so glad you asked. I have a whole bunch of
thoughts on the subject, and since the Steelers don’t kick off until 9
p.m. Monday I figure I have 36 hours to share them with you. Just
kidding. But let me throw several out for your consideration.
The first one is that
only God can give us a true heart transplant. Everybody has things
about themselves that they wish they could change. How many here wish
they could change something about themselves? How many are sitting
beside somebody they wish they could change?
The plain fact is that
some of the things we wish we could change about ourselves, the real
problems in our lives, require a whole new heart. You see this a lot in
addictions of all kinds. People want to break their addictions, whatever
they are, but they aren’t willing to change their heart, where it all
has to start. My brothers and sisters, God has to make the changes
within. You can get all the cosmetic changes on the outside that you
want, but God has to make the changes inside, where it counts. If you’re
here this morning knowing you need to change, but aren’t willing to let
God change you, you simply won’t achieve lasting change.
But if you’re here
thinking “I’ve got problems and I need God to help me make the changes
to deal with them,” then you will be successful. He is so eager to see
that you get the new heart you need.
Again reading from
Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord
has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to bind up
the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captive and release the
prisoners from darkness.”
God’s treatment is
always the same—nothing short of a transplant. In the Book of Ezekiel
God says “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in
them. I will remove their heart of stone and give them a heart of
flesh.”
That passage is
especially important to me, because that’s why I need a transplant—my
heart is gradually getting all hard and stiff and inflexible. But isn’t
that what we all suffer? Spiritually, emotionally, in terms of the love
we are able to share, our hearts get hard and stiff and unloving. We
need that spiritual transplant.
The second point is that
our hearts must be open to the truth about ourselves. I don’t
know if any of you ever had a job where you carried your lunch to work
in one of those old-fashioned black steel lunch boxes with the thermos
on top. Well, in this story a factory whistle would signal the lunch
break for all employees, who would stream outside and sit on benches to
eat. One worker sat next to one of these big bruiser guys.. They didn’t
really know each other, they just started to eat. And the big bruiser
opened one of these black steel lunch boxes, unwrapped his sandwich and
started to complain, “Oh, man, peanut butter again.”
The next day, the two
men again sat on the same bench to eat lunch, and the same thing
happened. The big bruiser opened his sandwich, took one look and started
to gripe, “Man, if I have to eat peanut butter one more day I’m gonna
die.” The third day came and the lunch whistle blew. The two men again
sat together, and once more the big guy opened his sandwich, took one
look and started to bellyache. “I can’t stand peanut butter.” Finally
the other man could stand it no longer. He said, “Look buddy, if you
don’t like peanut butter, why don’t you get your wife to make you some
other kind of sandwich?”
And the big guy glared
at him and said, “What do you know about it? I pack my own lunch.”
Do you get the point
here? In the end, we all pack our own lunch. But sometimes our hearts
are closed to what God is trying to tell us. We say, “Don’t confuse me
with the truth.”
Third, we might ask,
Why does the heart need to be pure? Because that’s where God makes his
home. Paul’s letter to the Romans says that “Hope does not
disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our
hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
Each week I pray that
God will make his home with us forever. That has to happen in the heart,
the seat of love. And even after our best efforts, God still needs to
clean up the heart and make things acceptable for his holy presence. I
know some of you served in the military and maybe you were subjected to
the white gloves test. You know, that’s where you had to clean up the
barracks for inspection and some pain in the neck officer would wear
white gloves to check for dirt.
Of course, he always
found some, and you didn’t get off duty until the whole cleaning thing
was redone.
If I were to ask you to
name something that occurs in nature that symbolizes purity and
cleanliness, some of you might say “a snowflake.” Did you know that a
tiny bit of dust forms the core of every snowflake? It’s true—every
snowflake literally has a “dirty heart.”
Same thing with us. No
matter how hard we clean, we cannot make our hearts pure enough for God
through our own efforts. But when the blood of Christ is applied to the
heart, God removes every stain, every sin and washes the heart whiter
than snow. That’s a heart that’s fit for God to make his dwelling with
his people.
Finally we know that
the mercy of God is always ready to flow into the hearts that have been
opened to him. Today I’m really into quoting Isaiah, which has much
to say about God’s care for the human heart: “For thus says the High and
Holy One that inhabits eternity, whose name is holy, I dwell in the high
and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit,
to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the
contrite ones.” In other words,
even though God is far above us in holiness, he is never remote from his
people—he is always ready to revive failing hearts if only we invite him
to do so in a spirit of contrition.
So this then is today’s
closing story, about a man who discovers the nature of Christi’s heart
and his own contrition. There was once a man who didn’t believe in God,
and he didn’t hesitate to let others know how he felt about religion and
religious holidays. His wife, however, did believe, and she raised her
children to also have faith in God and Jesus. One snowy Christmas Eve,
his wife was taking their children to a service in the farm community in
which they lived. She asked him to come, but he refused.
“That story is
nonsense!” he said. “Why would God lower himself to come to Earth as a
man? That’s ridiculous!” So she and the children left, and he stayed
home. A while later, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a
blizzard. As the man looked out the window, all he saw was a blinding
snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire for the evening.
Then, he heard a loud
thump. Something had hit the window. Then, another thump! He looked out,
but couldn’t see more than a few feet. When the snow let up a little, he
ventured outside to see what could have been beating on his window. In
the field near his house he saw a flock of wild geese. Apparently, they
had been flying south for the winter when they got caught in the
snowstorm and couldn’t go on. They were lost and stranded on his farm,
with no food or shelter. They just flapped their wings and flew around
the field in low circles, blindly and aimlessly. A couple of them had
flown into his window, it seemed.
The man felt sorry for
the geese and wanted to help them. The barn would be a great place for
them to stay, he thought. It’s warm and safe; surely they could spend
the night and wait out the storm. So he walked over to the barn and
opened the doors wide, then watched and waited, hoping they would notice
the open door and go inside. But the geese just fluttered around
aimlessly or didn’t seem to notice the barn or realize what it could
mean for them.
The man tried to get
their attention, but that just seemed to scare them and they moved
further away.
He went into the house
and came with some bread, broke it up, and made a breadcrumb trail
leading to the barn. They still didn’t catch on. He got behind them and
tried to shoo them toward the barn. Nothing could get them to go into
the barn.
“Why don’t they follow
me?” he exclaimed. “Can’t they see this is the only place where they can
survive the storm?” He thought for a moment and realized that they just
wouldn’t follow a human. “If only I were a goose, then I could save
them,” he said out loud. Then he had an idea. He went into the barn, got
one of his own geese, and carried it in his arms as he circled around
behind the flock of wild geese. He then released it. His goose flew
through the flock and straight into the barn – and one by one the other
geese followed it into safety.
He stood silently for a
moment as the words he had spoken a few minutes earlier replayed in his
mind: “If only I were a goose, I could save them!” Then he thought about
what he had said to his wife earlier: “Why would God want to become like
us? That’s ridiculous!”
Suddenly, it all made
sense. That is what God had done. We were like the geese – blind, lost,
perishing. God had His Son become like us so He could show us the way
and save us. That was the meaning of Christmas, he realized.
His soul became quiet
and pondered this wonderful thought. Suddenly, he understood what
Christmas was all about, why Christ had come. Years of doubt and
disbelief vanished like the passing storm. He fell to his knees in the
snow, and prayed his first prayer: “Thank You, God, for coming in human
form to get me out of the
storm!”
Jesus said: “Come unto
Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
That is exactly what we all need – God’s rest and peace in our spirits,
minds and bodies. Christ is the answer to this sin-sick world! Today I
invite you to ask Christ to take up residence in your heart—but only
after he has taken away your heart of stone and transplant a heart of
love, just like his own.
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