"A Matter of the Heart"

Dear Friends in Christ,

    A couple weeks ago my wife Marilyn received a phone call from her sister Jan telling her that her husband Bill, who of course is our brother-in-law, had had a heart attack.  Thankfully it wasn’t a massive heart attack, but it was bad enough to land him in the hospital for most of that week and it necessitated 2 stents being placed in his arteries where blockage had occurred.  The scary thing about all this is that Bill was at home alone when it happened.  When I heard that, I immediately thought of an email that has made its rounds on the Internet that describes what a person should do if they ever find themselves in that situation.  That article says:

   “Without help, the person whose heart stops beating properly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness. However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously. A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest. A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating. The squeezing pressure on the heart also helps it regain normal rhythm. In this way, heart attack victims can get to a phone and, between breaths, call for help.”

   So, if you’re having a heart attack, start coughing for all you’re worth, get to a phone, and call 911.  Even if you have heard this before, it never hurts to be reminded.  For we all want to take care of our hearts, don’t we?

   The heart is an amazing organ.  Consider the following heart facts:  It weighs only about twelve ounces, but if the heart beats at seventy-two beats per minute, it pumps through itself forty-five pounds of blood per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 32.4 tons per day. It is a muscle that never rests except between beats. Every thirty seconds all the blood in the body passes through the heart. It has a grip greater than that of one’s fist.  The heart does about one-fifth of the mechanical work of the body and exerts enough energy each hour to lift its own weight 13,000 feet into the air.  

   Indeed, the heart is a remarkable piece of equipment, but it can have problems, as some of you are painfully aware. The American Heart Association reports that more than 58,000,000 Americans suffer from one or more cardiovascular diseases. Coronary heart disease is the single leading cause of death in the United States. Every 29 seconds someone in this country will suffer a coronary event. Every minute someone will die from heart disease.

   I’m sure most of us are well aware that our emotions as well as our lifestyle can have an effect on our hearts. How else do we explain the fact that twenty percent more people have fatal heart attacks on Monday mornings than any other day or time in the week? When you say, “My job is killing me!” you may very well be speaking the truth.

   Now you might be wondering, “Why all this talk about the heart?”  Well, because that’s the topic that David addresses in our text for today which is taken from one of the best known penitential psalms in Scripture, a psalm that is often times read or alluded to during this penitential season of the year known as Lent.  In v. 10 of our text David writes, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

   Please note that David is not praying that God will give him a new physical heart as one might receive in a heart transplant.  Rather, when the Bible speaks of the heart, it is usually referring to the seat of our emotions, the place in our bodies and our brains where we feel things very deeply.

   David was well acquainted with his heart in that sense and you can’t help but notice it when you read his psalms which are packed with all kinds of emotion.  And this especially comes out in the psalm we’re looking at today because David did a very stupid thing.  In fact, he did a series of stupid things. First of all, he got involved with a married woman.  Her name was Bathsheba.  As king, David could marry as many women as he wanted.  In fact he already had several wives at this point.  Not that this was right in the eyes of God or approved by him.   It was just kind of expected of kings back then.  But what wasn’t expected was for the king to take another man’s wife.  Yet that’s exactly what David did, secretively at first as he carried on a clandestine affair with Bathsheba.

   But then when he learned that she was carrying his child, he did something even more stupid. He had her husband killed in battle.  We would call that a good old classic cover-up.  And if there is one thing we learn from the sad example of some of our politicians these days who are notorious for their cover-ups it is that the consequences of a cover-up are usually far worse than those of the deed itself.  And that’s exactly what David discovered.  But it was those consequences that led David to write the beautiful words of this penitential psalm.  Listen to how he begins:  “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.  Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight . . .” Then a few verses later we read his sincere plea: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.”

   David knew he had done wrong. He had let his heart override his brain. He had let his heart overrule his values. He had let his heart damage his relationships with those around him. Even more importantly, he had let his heart damage his relationship with God.  And so he prays for a new heart.    

   My friends, we’re no different than David.  We’re no better than David.  We too need a new heart. For we have hearts that are filled with anger, jealousy, bitterness, resentment, guilt, lust and a host of other negative emotions. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll have to admit that they’ve taken their toll on us.  Like David, we may no longer feel the joy of our salvation.  Like David, we may feel that we have fallen from God’s grace.  Like David, we fear punishment from God.  So like David, we need to pray, “Create in me a new heart, O God.”

   But is that even possible?  Is it possible to get rid of all those negative, hurtful feelings that sometimes well up within us and often overwhelm us? Is it possible to get rid of all that guilt and greed, lust and loathing, fear and unfaithfulness?  In other words, is it possible to change?

   Some people would say no, it’s not possible.  Just like a leopard can’t change its spots and a zebra can’t change its stripes, so a person can’t change their heart or their life.  You are who you are and you’ll always be that way.  So you might as well learn to live with it.  You might as well learn to accept it.  But I’m not among those who would agree with that, for I believe the Bible teaches differently.  At the same time though I would say that change does not come easily.  It’s kind of like losing weight.  For most people that is a major ordeal.  And they’re never quite able to pull it off, no pun intended.  And the reason they can’t is because that weight has been with them a long time and it’s not going to come off without a fight. Well, that’s the way it is with the sin in our lives.  Our tendency to sin did not develop overnight. It’s been with us a long time.  How long?  Well, David tells us in verse 5 of Psalm 51: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.”   So our hearts have been tainted since birth.  In fact, they’ve been out of whack since the moment we were conceived.  In theological circles, the term we use for this is original sin.  So think about that.  If it’s been with us that long, then it’s not going to go away very easily, is it?

   The Apostle Paul understood this and wrote about it so well in Romans 7 where he describes the battle that he faced each day with his sinful heart.  Now keep in mind that these words come from a man who was the chief pillar in the early Christian church.  Yet he says in vv. 18-19: “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing.”  You sense Paul’s frustration there?  You sense his weariness of constantly fighting against his sinful heart?  I don’t know about you, but I find comfort in knowing that this great pillar of the faith faced such struggles because I do too and it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one.  But it’s also nice to know that there is an answer to the question Paul asks when he says: “Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin?”  For in the very next verse he writes: “Thank God!  The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

   So even though change is difficult, the good news is that through Christ it is possible.   That’s really the basis of organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous.  The first step in the well known 12-step program that members of AA follow is to admit that you are powerless when it comes to changing yourself.  The 2^nd step is to recognize that there is a higher power who can help you.  And while that term “higher power” can mean just about anything to different people, we in the Christian church would of course recognize God as the only “higher power” that can help us change our sinful hearts and our sinful lives.  Only he can grant what David was asking for in our text for today when he said: “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.”

   As I was working on this sermon, I came across a great story that Bible scholar William Barclay tells of one man who was given a new heart.  His name was Tockichi Ishii.

   Ishii was a Japanese criminal with an unparalleled record of some of the most ruthless crimes ever committed.  He had murdered men, women and children in cold blood without giving a second thought to what he did.  At last he was caught.  In prison, he was like a caged tiger.  He was visited by two Canadian women who tried to speak to him through the bars; but he simply glowered at them like a wild beast. They left a Bible with him which he began to read.  Once he started, he couldn’t stop.  He read on and on, eventually coming to the story of Christ’s crucifixion.  When he came to Jesus’ words: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing,” he broke.  “I stopped,” he said later on. “I was stabbed to the heart as if pierced with a five‑inch nail. Shall I call it the love of Christ? Shall I call it his com­passion? I do not know what to call it. I only know that I believed and my hardness of heart was changed.”

   Later when the jailer came to lead Ishii to the scaffold for his hanging, he found not the surly brute that he had expected to find, but a man radiant with the love of Christ, for, as William Barclay puts it, “Tockichi Ishii, the murderer, had been born again.”

Amen.