Jesus Changes our Heart

Jesus Changes Everything

Week 2 – Jesus Changes our Heart

Series Slide

Good morning and welcome to worship! What a blessing it has been to see all this rain! Amen!

We are in our second week of looking at how Jesus changes everything. When God became flesh and dwelt among us, everything changed. Through Jesus, we learned what it meant to live and love. Jesus, the one present at Creation gave up the glory of heaven to walk among us, the created so that we can know what it is to be in relationship with God and one another. Last week we looked at the fact that when we are in Christ, when we give our lives to Jesus, when we live as a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, it changes us, but it also changes everything around us!

Remember,

2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

Jesus changes everything.

Now, “everything” is kinda vague, so we want to get a little more specific. This week, across the congregation – all three worship services and in Middle School and Sr. High Youth, we are considering how Jesus changes our heart.

Sermon Slide

I know, these days when we think of our heart getting changed, we think of the blood pump in the middle of our chest. That’s what we think of when we think of heart… and, I want you to hear from someone who has dealt with a little bit of a heart issue, but it wasn’t just the problem with the ticker that changed his life. This week’s testimony comes from Tim Fulfer.

<Tim Fulfer Video>

Thank you Tim…

As we continue in this message, we have so many verses we could go to when we look at the heart, and the one I want to start with is Psalm 51:10. As you flip over to Psalm 51, I want to set up the story of why this Psalm was written. You can find the story in 2 Samuel 11-12. One day during the season when “kings go to war” King David decided to stay in the palace and let others go to war. Then, as he was standing on his veranda overlooking the city, he spied a young lady bathing on her roof. Why was she bathing on her roof… because that’s where you went in that culture to bathe. David saw this beautiful lady Bathsheba and decided that he liked what he saw and wanted her brought to him. His attendants brought her to him, they began an affair, even though she was the husband of one of David’s generals and he had his own wife – or wives. He later discovers that she is pregnant and tries to get her husband, Uriah the Hittite, to come back and sleep with her. When Uriah turns out to be a better man that David, David sets up a scenario where Uriah is killed in combat. David thinks he has the problem solved… he brings Bathsheba into his home and she becomes his wife and they are to live happily ever after… The only problem is that Nathan the prophet knows what happened and comes to David with a story about a rich man with all the sheep he could ever want needing a lamb to cook for a meal with a friend. Rather than slaughter one of his own sheep, he takes the one sheep that is loved by a poor man, takes it from him, slaughters it and has a feast. When Nathan asks what David would do with such a man, and David says – “he should pay for the lamb 4 times over and then be killed.” Then Nathan drops the truth bomb and tells David that he is that man.

This Psalm is the result of David’s realization of his sin.

Psalm 51:1-10

Have mercy on me, O God,

because of your unfailing love.

Because of your great compassion,

blot out the stain of my sins.

Wash me clean from my guilt.

Purify me from my sin.

For I recognize my rebellion;

it haunts me day and night.

Against you, and you alone, have I sinned;

I have done what is evil in your sight.

You will be proved right in what you say,

and your judgment against me is just.

For I was born a sinner—

yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.

But you desire honesty from the womb,

teaching me wisdom even there.

Purify me from my sins, and I will be clean;

wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.

Oh, give me back my joy again;

you have broken me—

now let me rejoice.

Don’t keep looking at my sins.

Remove the stain of my guilt.

Create in me a clean heart, O God.

Renew a loyal spirit within me.

<Prayer>

I don’t think David meant that God was supposed to take his blood pump out of his chest, wash it, and put it back in – do you? So, what does the Bible mean when we see the word “Heart?” His word in Hebrew is “Leb” and it’s the same word found all through the Old Testament.

Exodus 8:32 – “But Pharaoh’s (leb) heart was hardened…”

Judges 16:17 – “Sampson shared his (leb) secret/heart, with Delilah”

Jeremiah 12:3 – “Lord, you see and know my (leb) heart…”

Ezekiel 36:26 – “I will give you a new heart…”

Finally, we are warned in Proverbs to:

Proverb 4:23

Guard your heart above all else,

for it determines the course of your life.

Hebrew people weren’t talking about the blood pump when they said “heart” wasn’t the blood pump in the middle of the chest. That they meant was that the heart was the center of their being, it was their core, it was their conscience. In other words, their being, their life was contained in their heart. They saw the blood as life, it was even called life blood at times, and they saw the heart as that thing that controlled the flow of the life blood through their body.

That view didn’t really change much as we move into the New Testament and more Greek thought.

I guess we could always go to Jesus when we want to understand something about our lives and our relationship with God…

Luke records his version of the Sermon on the Mount in his 6th chapter. In that chapter he tells us that Jesus said: Luke 6:45

A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.

We can look at Paul’s words in Philippians 4:7

Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

In Proverbs, we were told to guard our heart, but in Philippians we are told that it is through our life in Jesus that our heart and mind is guarded.

Once again, Jesus and Paul aren’t talking about the ol’ ticker.

When we get into Greek thought we find that Homer considered the heart – The Kaardia - to be the emotional center of our life. Other Greeks of his time considered the heart the seat of moral and intellectual life.

By the time of Jesus and his followers, the Greek and Hebrew philosophies had intertwined and the Heart was seen as “the center of the personality.” One commentator says that “it controls the intellect, emotions, and will… The kardia is the seat and center of human life and I often refer to it as the "control center" if you will of our being.” (https://www.preceptaustin.org/heart_kardia)

From the Greek word for heart – Kardia, we get the terms Cardiac and Cardio.

I feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but let me give an example of the use of “heart” today. I love Mixed Martial Arts. I know, it’s sometimes a bloody bone breaking display of violence… at least that is what some see. When I watch it, what I see is the incredible athleticism of these men and women, with skills in a multitude of martial arts – Karate, Taekwondo, ju-jitsu, wrestling, judo, boxing, and every other combat sport you can imagine.

Maybe your vice is football or boxing or tennis… the principle is still the same, it’s just more on display in MMA.

Often, when a fighter is in the middle of a match and they are loosing, but they just won’t go down, the commentators talk about their heart.

Or maybe think of the movie Rocky. Rocky had heart, he wouldn’t back down, he wouldn’t stop, he wouldn’t give up… Apollo Creed kept knocking him down, but he got back up and kept fighting… he had “heart.”

What does all that have to do with Jesus changing our heart…

When we read scripture and we read about the “Heart” what we are reading about is the core of our being, the essence of who we are. And that is what we need Jesus to change.

When we read in Revelation that Jesus is “Standing at the door of our heart and knocking” that means that Jesus wants to be placed in the center of our lives.

Let me ask you… Is Jesus at the center of your life? Is Jesus at the core of what you do and who you are?

Because if I’m honest, there are times that I am at the center of my life, that I move Jesus off the throne and put myself on the throne of my life. There is an image that I remember from when I used the 4-Spiritual Laws as a tool to share the Gospel with others

<Image>

📷

It is a simple illustration that shows how, when we put ourselves on the throne of our lives and essentially push Christ out of our lives we begin to live in a chaotic undirected life. Life becomes frustrating as we try to do it our way. But, when we put Christ at the center, on the throne of our lives, and we submit ourselves to the Lordship, the leadership, of Jesus, our life becomes ordered. God orders our steps and we become aligned with Jesus. Our lives begin to be influenced and directed by our relationship with Jesus.

Even as we live with Christ on the throne, there are times we keep trying to usurp Jesus’ authority. Often we can be doing the stuff of the church, or as we read in

Isaiah 29:13,

They honor me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me.

This is where I find myself so often… going through the motions of the Christian life… being the holy preacher… “gotta show the world that I’m a preacher”… I honor God with my lips, but my heart is far from God.

I don’t think I’m alone in recognizing that fact about our lives. But here is the good news.

Romans 5:8

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Jesus comes while our heart is broken. It’s like we are on that walk downtown, and we just can’t get enough breath… we keep thinking we’re fine, but the truth that our heart is broken… we need a Triple By-Pass, and Jesus is the surgeon. When we return to Christ, when we put Jesus on the throne of our life, when we put Jesus at the core of our being, Jesus comes in and changes everything, Jesus gives us open-heart surgery and creates within us a clean heart and renews a right spirit within us.

That’s what it means that Jesus changes our heart.

But here’s the thing. We don’t have to fix our heart… we can’t fix our heart, only Jesus can do that. There is nothing you can do, or I can do, to fix our heart or change our heart… Jesus changes our heart.

All we have to do is accept the work Jesus is already doing in us. In the world of Methodism, we call this Prevenient Grace. That God is working in us even before we know it, before we recognize it, before we are conscience of it. It is that grace that woos us to God and into relationship with God. Prevenient Grace is God preparing the surgical room for our open-heart surgery. The open-heart surgery is God’s Justifying Grace. That grace we receive when we say “yes”, when our heart is transformed, when we are made new. The great thing is that, God’s prevenient grace doesn’t stop when we say yes, it just shifts from wooing us to God, into a grace that woos us closer to God.

Once we have that changed heart, once we put Jesus on the throne of our lives, we should want to grow that relationship. We want to build that relationship. It’s like going to Cardiac Rehab, we strengthen what God has already done. How do we do that? By doing those things that help us grow in grace.

You are being handed a card that we as the staff want you to have. On one side is an explanation of and list of some of the Means of Grace described by John Wesley some 260 years ago. Then, on the other side is a list of some of the resources that your church staff uses to grow our relationship with God.

This week, you have homework. I want you to look at this list and find one thing that you are not already doing and begin that practice. Maybe it’s the Lectio 365 App, and each night and each morning as you go to sleep and as you wake up you listen and reflect on the scripture and prayers read.

Or maybe it is considering John Wesley’s works of piety and you are going to take time to pray and journal every morning.

I know, for some of you this list is like, “is this all, I’m already doing this and more”… but for others, you are looking at this list and thinking, “I don’t even know where to start” and you are overwhelmed by the thought of intentional time with God.

That’s OK. Just take it one step at a time, and Jesus will take those steps with you.

Remember, you can’t change your heart by yourself… it is a work of God, it is Jesus that changes our heart. My questions is, will you let him?