Hear, O Israel: Heart
Fourth in a series of six Jeremiah 31:31-34 // 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 // Mark 7:14-23 Our sermon texts are all three Dear Friends in Christ, Three weeks ago we began a six-part study of the Shema, an ancient prayer found in the book of Deuteronomy, a petition still prayed twice a day by devout Jewish believers. Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Once again, we turn to the structure of this prayer: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God. It begins with a command: Hear this. Listen up! I need your eyes for this: Hear that the Lord our God is one. Since he is God and he is one, therefore, Love the Lord your God. So far, we’ve gone Command, confession, Command. In the second half of this sermon series, , we answer the question, “With what do we love the Lord our God?” Love the Lord your God with what? With all your heart today, with all your soul next week, and with all your strength the week after. And today, “Love the Lord Your God with all your heart.” So, here’s my question to you: What are the desires of your heart? Is that an easy question or a hard one? Do you know the desires of your heart, or not? I can tell you this, I don’t have a teenaged daughter, but I’m told that from time to time a dad comes home to see his teenage daughter, the pride of his heart, crying on the couch. He wants to fix things; he wants to make it all better, and so he asks her, “What’s wrong?” And do you know what she says? She says through tears, “Dad, I don’t know.” She doesn’t know the desires of her heart. Or, I’ve been around enough 8thgrade boys to know that they can be knuckleheads. I’m young enough to remember being an 8thgrader and being a knucklehead; doing and saying things that just didn’t make sense. And you ask them, “What were you thinking?” They say, “I dunno.” Sometimes they say that because they just don’t want you to know, but much of the time, they really don’t know. They don't know the desires of their heart. I was at a leadership training seminar, the first thing they did was tell us to calm ourselves and to answer the question, “How are you?” I calmed myself and realized, apart from the usual throw-away answer, “Good” or “Peachy” (which aren’t all bad, but that’s a discussion for a different time) I didn’t really know how I was. Or, to say it in a different way, I didn’t know the desires of my heart. There’s a parable that the philosopher James K. A. Smith retells, of two people in a wasteland future being guided to a room where you receive the desires of your heart. They get right there, to the edge of the room. “[The two] hesitate because it dawns on them: What if I don’t know what I want? ‘Well,’ [the author] observes, ‘that’s for the Room to decide. The Room reveals all; what you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for.’ A disturbing epiphany is creeping up on [the two]: what if they don’t want what they think?” If you’ve ever struggled to complete a diet, if you’ve ever sabotaged yourself on a way to a goal, you know that what you think you wish for (in your brain) can be different than what you deeply wish for. We’re beginning this meditation at the point where our little word study video ended. We saw that the Hebrew word for heart, Lev, encompasses the place life springs from, thoughts spring from, feelings spring from, and at the root of that all are our motivations, our desires. We can control our actions and our thoughts; we can name our feelings, much of the time at best we can only guess at our motivations. There is more about ourselves than we know about ourselves. That’s part of what Paul’s saying in the epistle. The first step of humility is to know how little we know, and the first step that Paul takes is to think, “If I don’t even know all of my motivations, how can I judge the motivations of someone else?” Paul isn’t saying, “Don't judge the actions of others. Don’t name your emotions. He is saying, “Leave to God the things that are God’s.” Let the God who shines light into the darkness be the one who discloses the purposes of your heart. What part of your life, if you were honest, would you really wish God would leave alone? Because much of the time, we would rather God only look at our actions, not at our thoughts, not at our inmost desires. We would rather him look at the outside, because not even we sometimes know what’s deep down in ourselves. Jesus goes a step further. He says, evil actions don’t come from what goes into you; they flow from a corrupted heart. As Jesus always does through the Gospels, he raises the level of expectation in the Law up to the top. Every single sin demonstrates not a scratch that needs a bandaid, but that something in us is fundamentally flawed, fundamentally broken. Bad fruit aren’t the problem; the bad tree that bears bad fruit is the problem. But here, of course, is the kingdom of heaven. Because, you’ll note, it’s Jesus speaking the words of our Gospel. It is mercy incarnate telling us by words of love that we cannot do it on our own. It is the Living Forgiveness that in the same breath as he condemns our sins he takes them upon himself and the only One who has pure motivations takes on all that flows from our wicked desires. The one that knows us better than we know ourselves loves us more than we can understand, The word for this is sincerity, in the Greek, haplotetis, literally meaning “Single-hearted.” That your life and your thoughts and your deeds and your desires are single-hearted. Because the Lord our God, the Lord is single-hearted, he is of one purpose he is One and because -- here are the simple and beautiful words of our Old Testament reading: because he would be our God, so that we can be his people. Which brings us back, like our little video, to Jeremiah 31. The goal of the Christian life is so that we know the Lord: that the truths of God would be so ingrained in us, that after day after day of forgiving and being forgiven, after day after day of loving and caring and being cared for and being loved, after day after day of having compassion and weeping together and laughing together, then the law of God wouldn’t be something that we need to follow, but that it would be laid on our hearts, it would be our immediate reaction, it would be the new covenant that we run to and cling to in every trouble and trial, that we would praise in every good thing. Three thoughts for today at the end of sermon. Thought number one is that one of the goals of Scripture is that by this vast collection of human experiences, we would know the thoughts and motivations of our hearts. Second, the primary goal of Scripture is that we would know the thoughts and motivations of our God; we would know him as he is. Third, the third goal of the Scriptures is that by knowing our God more, it would shape us even more into his people. Praise be to God that he is single-hearted in his desire that all are saved through faith in Christ. Praise be to God that he sent his son Amen and amen.
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