Heart Check

Introduction: You are What You Love

When I was in college, I wanted to graduate early and head to seminary. I had some credits coming in, and I took a few extra summer classes, I took a May-mester and after my second year, I was reviewing my classes and it looked like I could graduate basically a year early. I was gonna have to take one summer class, but then I was going to come to Dallas actually to attend DTS. I came and did a visit and everything. That was the plan. However, that’s not actually what happened. What happened was that I decided to run for election as the student government chaplain and I stayed for my 4th year and I took just one class per semester my entire senior year and waited to go to seminary. From one perspective, it might seem like a waste of a year. Why spread out two classes over an entire year when I could get them over with and get going on my master’s?

Well, the answer really is quite simple. Because there’s one very important piece of information that I haven’t told you yet. In November of my junior year, I started dating a girl named Karly. And, three weeks after we started dating she moved to Spain for the semester to study abroad and we spent basically the first 5 months of our relationship long-distance and by the time she got back, I’d be headed to Dallas and we’d have to do another year long-distance. And that was not happening. There were a lot of reasons I decided to stay another year, but underneath all those was the core reason I wanted to stay: to see about a girl.

Now don’t judge me too hard. Don’t tell me you’ve never made a decision for love before. In fact, I think that underneath all our reasons and justifications, most of the decisions we make come down to what we really love.

There’s a great book called You are What You Love, and this is the whole point: what we love, what we desire, what we long for, more than anything else, that is what shapes how we live and who we become. The author writes:

“To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life…and we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love.”

When I was a teen, my family was super into the Pirates of the Carribbean movies. I dressed up as Jack Sparrow for a school talent show. And Jack Sparrow has this special compass. It doesn’t point north; it points toward whatever the person holding it wants most in the world. It directs him to what he loves, and that’s often true of us as well. What we love, our hearts, direct how we act and live in the world.

If we love travel, we’ll make our decisions around how to see the world. If we love music, we’ll spend time, money, and energy to listen to and play music. If we love stuff, we’ll orient our lives around how to get more of it. If we love feeling productive, we’ll spend our time working and seeking affirmation of our productivity. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s how God made us. We just need to be aware of what we love and how it’s directing us. If we love God, that will show up in how we act and live.

That’s why, when Jesus said that the greatest commandments are to love God with our whole self and to love our neighbor as our self, he added, “All the law and prophets hang on these two commandments.” Because if we truly love God and others above all else, then that love will direct all of our actions in such a way that we’ll keep all the commandments of Scripture.

Last week, we started a new series called Spiritual Health Check. Just as each year, it’s important to check in our physical health and our mental health, it’s important to regularly check in on our spiritual health. So, last week, PV talked about how we need a Mind Check. We need to check up on what we think about and what we’re allowing into our soul through our thought patterns.

This week, it’s time for our Heart Check. I’ve got my stethoscope here and maybe when you go to a physical, the doctor might use their stethoscope to listen to your lungs and then listen to your heart beat. And they’re listening to make sure everything is good, the heart is beating normally and rhythmically. Because your heart is pumping blood and therefore life into the rest of your body.

The heart, in Scripture and in culture, is often a symbol of what we love in the deepest parts of ourselves. So, today, we want to listen to our hearts to ask the question: What Do You Love?

So, the main question I have for you today is this: What do you love?

Main Question: What Do You Love?

PRAYER

And how we’re going to do that today is by looking at the example of King David from the Bible. David is called “A Man After God’s Own Heart.” He was someone who loved God with his whole heart. So, I’m going to quickly walk through an overview of some scenes from David’s life and see what they might show us about what it means to truly love God.

David: A Man who Loved God

We honor God with faith

The first scene is David’s most famous story, the duel between him and Goliath. Israel was at war with another nation, Philistia, and Goliath was this monster Philistine, a giant, terrifying warrior. One time, when I still lived in Indiana, I had pretty good seats at a Pacers-Magic game and Dwight Howard was like ten feet away from me and I could not believe how tall he looked in real life. And Goliath was way taller than that. And Goliath’s challenge to the people of Israel was this: send somebody out to fight me and we’ll settle the war between our nations. And all of the Israelite warriors were like, nah, I’m good. But David shows up, and David’s not even supposed to be there. He’s not in the army, he just brought his older brothers’ lunchables and he’s like, who is this guy and why are we letting him diss God? So, David decides to fight him and everyone tries to get him to stop. King Saul is like, bro, you have no shot, you’re gonna die. And David’s like, no, God will take care of me, so they finally let him fight Goliath. And Goliath makes fun of him and curses him in the name of the Philistine gods, and says he’s going to kill him and then David gives a little speech and says, “the LORD will conquer you” and finishes this way:

1 Samuel 17:47 NLT

And everyone assembled here will know that the Lord rescues his people, but not with sword and spear. This is the Lord’s battle, and he will give you to us!”

And then, of course, he throws a stone at Goliath and kills him and the Israelites win the war against the Philistines.

From this story, we can see that David loved God and the way that he loved God was that he honored him by putting his faith in him. We love God when we honor him with our faith. So, for us, the first heart check I want to do is ask ourselves if we’re truly putting our faith in God.

When we put our trust in God, we acknowledge that he is who he says he is and that he will do what he says he will. We are honoring him by telling ourselves and the world that God is so awesome that he keeps his promises.

And that’s what David does. He’s the only one in Israel who is willing to stand up and say, “God can defeat Goliath.” Maybe in your life, you’re facing something that seems impossible, seems insurmountable, and you can show your love of God by standing up and saying, “God’s got this. I trust him.”

I want you to think about something you’re good at: maybe it’s cooking or listening or building stuff or teaching or playing cornhole—whatever. Now I want you to imagine that someone you love needs that skill. They need a meal made and or someone to tutor their kids or a cornhole partner. And you’re like, don’t worry, I got you. I’ll take care of it. But then you show up and they’re like, um actually, we hired this random dude to do it because we weren’t sure if you’d do a good job. That wouldn’t feel very good. It wouldn’t feel like they really love you and trust you.

And yet that’s what we so often do with God. I mean, he’s literally God, the God who holds the whole world in his hands, and he has offered, no, promised, to take care of us, to be there for us, and yet so often he’s the last person we turn to when we need help. Too often, I have to get to the point where I’m hopeless and ready to give up and have no idea where to go and then I’m like, oh yeah, I can pray. I can ask God. And then I’m always like, duh. why didn’t I start with that?

And the other thing about what David does is that he does it publicly. He’s not hiding his faith in God, but he stands up in front of both armies and declares his trust for the world to see. I think sometimes for us as Christians, it’s easy to put our faith on display privately or even around other Christians. But are you willing to put your faith in God in such a way that the world can see? That’s a mark of true love. So, if we want to know if we’re loving God, we can check to see if we’re honoring him by faith.

We worship God with joy

In the next scene, after David has become king, he brings the ark of the covenant back from the Philistines, who had stolen it, and he brings it into the Jerusalem. The ark was a box of sacred items from Israel’s history and it represented God’s presence. It sat in the holiest place in the tabernacle, where only the priests could go. And David really wants it in back in its rightful place in Jerusalem. So, he retrieves and brings it home, and he throws a giant celebration and he sacrifices animals to God and the people of Israel played music and David dances before the Lord to worship God in, let’s say, not a lot of clothes. Then, he celebrates some more, blesses the people, and comes home. His wife, Michal, is angry because she thinks he humiliated himself. But David says:

2 Samuel 6:21–22 NLT

David retorted to Michal, “I was dancing before the Lord, who chose me above your father and all his family! He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord, so I celebrate before the Lord. Yes, and I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes! But those servant girls you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished!”

And then, in the very next chapter, David starts to prepare to build a temple for the presence of God.

What we see here is David just overwhelmed by joy at the return of the ark into Jerusalem, because the ark is the presence of God. So, he sees this as God’s returning to his rightful place in the lives of the Israelites and he wants to honor God and worship God and show him his love, so he gets excited! He dances and he sacrifices and he blesses the people.

So, the second check we need to do on our heart to see if we’re truly loving God is to ask ourselves, do I worship God with joy? Do you go out of your way to worship God? David was the one who led this whole enterprise to bring the ark home and to celebrate its return. Do you get excited about worshipping God? Does it make you want to dance down the street?

Now, listen, I’m not saying we all need to dance down the street and I’m not saying all of us have the same outward expression of joy. Karly and I figured out pretty early in our relationship that we have different excited responses. Here’s a good example. Last week, our oldest played in a basketball game for her senior night, and it was a close game. They were behind pretty much the whole game until the 4th quarter and our team started to go on a run, and all the sudden, KK gets a pass and she drives past her girl to the basket and she goes up strong and she lays it in to get within one point. Karly stood and yelled and waved her arms in the air and stomped her feet. I stayed seated and I said, “Let’s go!” But that was also probably the loudest I’ve ever been watching a basketball game. So, we had different outward expressions of excitement, but we were both pumped about what happened.

When it comes to worship, everyone will respond to God’s goodness differently, but there should be evidence of joy. Whatever joy looks like for you, it ought be obvious that you enjoy worshipping God. So, maybe you blast worship music and dance around the house, or maybe you can’t wait to open up your Bible, or maybe you keep telling people about the awesome stuff God is doing in your life, or maybe you show up early to church every week and stay late because you just love worshipping with the community of God. Whatever it is, your love of God can be evident when you worship him with joy.

We follow God with humility

Probably the second most famous story about King David is his immense failure with Bathsheba. Israel was at war with the Ammonites, but David didn’t go. He stayed home and he saw Bathsheba and he sent his men to bring her to the palace and he slept with her and she got pregnant. So, then, in an attempt to cover it up, he brought home her husband from the war, Uriah, and he tried to trick him into going home to be with her so he’d the think the baby was his but it didn’t work because Uriah was too righteous and wanted to go back to be with his men in the war. So, David sent him back to the war with a command to put him on the front line and leave him exposed. And that’s what they did and, sure enough, Uriah was killed in battle. Then, once he was dead, David sent his men to get Bathsheba again and she became one of his wives.

Honestly, just recounting that story makes me a little sick. What David did was evil—every step of it. Some of the worst actions in the entire Bible. It’s the opposite of love for God. But, thankfully, the story doesn’t end there. The prophet Nathan comes to David and he calls him out. He tells a story about a rich man with flocks and flocks of animals who steals the only lamb of a poor man to feed a guest. And David gets riled up. He tells Nathan, that man deserve to die. And then Nathan turns it on him: “You are that man!” He says. And David finally understands and this is how he responds.

2 Samuel 12:13 NLT

Then David confessed to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan replied, “Yes, but the Lord has forgiven you, and you won’t die for this sin.

He realizes his wrong and he acknowledges his sin. Later, in the Psalms, we have a song that David wrote about this experience. Psalm 51 has a note under it: a Psalm of David, regarding the time Nathan the prophet came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. In that Psalm, David expresses his deep remorse about his actions and prays for God’s forgiveness and restoration. Listen to these two verses:

Psalm 51:10–11 NLT

Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a loyal spirit within me. Do not banish me from your presence, and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me.

Despite David’s colossal failure to obey God well and live righteously, he humbly admits his wrong and makes an effort to make it right. And that’s the last way we can show our love for God: to follow his ways and his commands with humility. Because there is the first part where love God by trying to live the way he has called us to, following his example, but then there’s the second part where we have to have humility when we fail.

Humility means we are willing to admit when we’re wrong and make an effort to make it right. The Bible word for that is repentance. David repented from his sin and followed God again.

How do you respond when you fall short of God’s command? Do you come up with all the reasons why it’s fine and no big deal. Do you do like Adam and Eve and point the finger: it was the woman you gave me. It was the snake you made. It was my spouse or my kids or whatever.

When we show humility and when we turn around and try to make things right and truly, correctly follow God’s commands, we are living in love toward him. Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

How can we learn to love God?

So, we’ve seen the life of David a few ways that he loved God that we can use to check our own hearts to see whether we are truly loving God. We love God when we put our faith in him, when we are joyful in our worship, and when we repent and live rightly. If those marks aren’t evident in your life, then maybe that is a symptom of a love deficiency. And if you have a love deficiency, then maybe you need a daily dose of something to grow your love for God.

Because love is something that you have control over. When we get caught up in love as ONLY a feeling, then we think, well, I can’t control how I feel. I either feel like I love God or I don’t. I feel like I trust him or I don’t. I feel excited about connecting with him or I don’t. But love isn’t only a feeling. In fact, it’s a choice. And often, it’s a choice to put ourselves in a place to love God before we feel the feeling, and then the feeling comes later.

Which means that we can put into practice some things that will help us grow in God. I have two here that think can help us to grow in our love for God.

2 Practices:

The first is Fasting. And here I mean fasting as more of a general category of removing things in your life that are getting in the way of your love for God. We usually have a hard time loving God because we’re so busy loving other things (Matt. 6 - You cannot serve God & money). So, spend some time thinking about yourself and what tends to vie for your love instead of God, and think about how to remove that from your life, whether indefinitely or for a season. We talked in the fall about Sabbath. You could think of Sabbath as a way of fasting from the culture of hurry and productivity. Generosity is a form of fasting from our desires to want more, spend more, have more. Maybe you really love being comfortable and you need to do something outside your comfort zone, maybe you really love the attention of others and you need to spend some doing something just for you.

The second practice is Meditating on God’s love. 1 John 4:19. If you want to grow in your love for God, you have to know how much God has loved you and, because we’re forgetful and because often the truth can get in our heads but get stuck on the way down to our heart, we have to remind ourselves of this regularly. How has God loved you? Maybe you memorize scripture about the love of God: Romans 5 or 1 John 4 are good places to start. John 3:16! Maybe you get together with Christians here on Sunday or in your group or on a random Tuesday at Torchy’s and you share with each other what God is doing in your life. Because the more you internalize the love that God has for you, the more that will create love in you for him.

The most ultimate display of God’s love for us is the gospel story. The story of our lostness, of the overwhelming chaos that we brought to the world in sin, and the brokenness each of us endure because of it. And the story of God chasing us down, pursuing us, and loving us way before we loved him. God chased us from heaven to earth, where he became human in Jesus, to experience all that we experience, to know just what it is like to endure the heaviness and brokenness of the world, and he offered his own life as a sacrifice to take away the sin of the world. He endured the very worst that sin has to offer and he died a criminal’s death on the cross. Not because he did anything wrong, but in fact the very opposite. Because he was perfect, we killed him. But sin and death do not have the last word because Jesus rose again on the third day to defeat sin and death and bring new life into the world and Jesus has invited each of us into his new world. He has invited you into his new world, no matter what your past is, whether you have loved him or not, because he loves you and he always will to the end of eternity.

PRAYER

Decision Time

The second scene is similar. After he killed Goliath, David started to get a lot of attention, and Samuel had already anointed him to be the next king of Israel, but the current king, Saul, obviously didn’t like that very much. So, for a while, even though David served King Saul with humility, Saul was trying to kill him. So David ran away and was hiding in the wilderness with some friends of his. And Saul brings an army out to to the wilderness and find him and kill him. So, David’s hiding out in this cave and, sure enough, Saul comes into the cave to use the restroom. It’s a perfect opportunity. David’s friends say, “David, God has give you this opportunity! Sneak up behind him and kill him!” But David won’t do it. He does sneak up and cut off a small part of his robe to prove that he was there, and then after Saul leaves, David comes out after him and explains that he doesn’t want to kill Saul. Again, he gives this moving speech. He says:

1 Samuel 24:10 NLT

This very day you can see with your own eyes it isn’t true. For the Lord placed you at my mercy back there in the cave. Some of my men told me to kill you, but I spared you. For I said, ‘I will never harm the king—he is the Lord’s anointed one.’

1 Samuel 24:15 NLT

May the Lord therefore judge which of us is right and punish the guilty one. He is my advocate, and he will rescue me from your power!”

Again, we see David putting his trust in God and then telling everyone about it.