The Heart of Christ

Introduction

Good morning Church family. I have missed the opportunity to preach the Word of God and I appreciate Scott allowing me to do so this morning. If you would like, go ahead and open your bibles to Matthew 11:28, is where we will be today. And as your are turning there, consider with me, what it is you need today. What is it you want today? Christmas season is coming up, the holidays are upon us, a time that we strive to feel cheerful, feel thankful, feel joyful. It’s a time of eating, of gift-giving, of eating, of family and friends, did I mention of eating? But as good-willing as we are, there is a lot of times that we enter the holiday season, with a harsh spirit, tired, and lost. We mean to be like Jolly Ole Saint Nick, yet a lot of times we can relate a lot more to the grouchy Ole Grinch. Is it bad that I relate most to the Grinch than any other Christmas movie character? That’s besides the point, but, can we just be honest for a second. It’s been a tough year for many of us. And the holidays are not always easy, reminding us of lost family members, hardships, brokenness. And that is the weight many of us are carrying even in this moment. So I ask you what is it you want today? What is it you need today? I am not a prophet, and I do not claim to know what is going on in your life at this moment, but I can tell you exactly what you need. What you need is rest. True, beautiful, life-giving, life-restoring rest. This message today is for the discouraged, the frustrated, the weary, the disenchanted. Listen to these words today:

“Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Opening Prayer:

When we want to get to know someone, we aim to know their heart. We listen to their words, we watch their actions, and we hope to learn what is truly their heart through it all. Do you realize that throughout all the Gospels, their is only one place where Jesus describes his own heart, and it is in these words that we just read. I want to particularly focus on verse 29 there: “For I am gentle and lowly in heart”. The heart in biblical terms, is not part of who we are but the very center of who we are. I want you to realize what Jesus is saying in this pivotal, beautiful statement. The heart of who the God, the Creator, Provider, Redeemer of the Universe. The All-Powerful, All-knowable, sovereign God, is gentle and lowly.

But what does that mean to be gentle and lowly.. We will examine these two core attributes of Christ together today.

The Greek word for “gentle” here occurs only twice in the rest of the book of Matthew, first being the work “meek” in the beatitudes, where the meek shall inherit the Earth in Matthew 5:5. And the other, in Matthew 21:5 , which quotes Zechariah 9:9 that “Jesus the King is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” Meek, Gentle, Humble. But sometimes we struggle understanding this side of Christ. Yes, we all can sit and say that we believe God is meek, gentle, humble, but when push comes to shove, we tend to redefine God into something else. He is the angry, disapproving God who feels ashamed. What we need to understand is that Christ is not a Savior made in our image, but rather the Savior in whom’s image I am called to be. We examine Christ and we judge him by our follied, broken, evil hearts instead of embracing who He truly is, and what can be seen of his heart. Examine even Matthew 21, the other text we see this word for gentler. We know the story of him entering into Jerusalem and we know the first thing he does in Jerusalem is flip some tables, some of us love that story, but we also vastly misinterpret it, and we misinterpret his anger just as the people of that day did.

Notice this in Matthew 21:12-15.

Many of you have been taught that Jesus was speaking in this moment against only the money-changers, but that’s not true. You see when Jesus walked into Jerusalem, the Jewish people cried out Hosanna believing Jesus was walking to the center of the town, right outside the Temple, where the Forces of Antonio, the Roman military rulers of Jerusalem were of that day. But instead Jesus went into the Temple itself and said these words, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers”. He said this not as a wrathful statement of just the moneychangers, but of the self-righteous, religious people of Israel who had taken the good news of the Gospel away from the people who needed it most. You see Jesus refers to Isaiah 56 here which is named: Salvation for the foreigners. Isaiah 56:7 says, “.. For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” This Jesus was not the one they expected, as an overthrower of the Roman Empire, but the one they needed as the overthrower of sin and the redeemer of sinners.

We read this passage and we may instinctly think of the wrath of God against the sinfulness of man. We may not think this text illustrates the gentleness of Christ, But what we don’t understand is that the wrath of Christ and the mercy and gentlessness of Christ are not at odds with one another. Rather, the two rise and fall together. We see the wrath of God but we also see his gentleness as he welcomes the blind, the lame, and the children to heal and love them. His humility and gentleness draws him to the broken, the hurting, the sinners. His humility and gentleness draws him to you. Draws him to me. Thank God.

His heart draws him so near to us, that when his heart is described as lowly, it carries a weight of meaning that we may never fully fathom. The word lowly here also carries about the meaning of humility, but rather a humility that infers destitution, or being brought down. It lovingly implies accessibility. A kind of accessibility that we would or could never expect from an all-good, all powerful God whom we have betrayed, turned away from… A kind of accessibility that required the God who created and named every star in the Heavens to step down from his throne and put on the flesh of his creation.

Read Hebrews 4:15.

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

Sympathize with our weaknesses - Christ knows you fully in your weaknesses. The word sympathize here is not a detached pity. It’s not what you feel when you watch the sad dog commercial or even when you pass by someone in need but keep driving. It literally means to share in suffering with… Christ shared in our suffering of our weaknesses, and by doing so, he shared in the messiest, parts of who you are. yet those are the parts He shares with you. The parts we want to hide away, keep secret, keep buried, he wants fully to open up, infiltrate, and flow into and out of. He wants to take every broken cistern of dirty, messed up water that you have in your heart and turn them into overwhelming abundances of everlasting, life-giving water. He relates to you in your weaknesses, because he felt every pain, every grief, every depressed thought, every overwhelming anxiety, and not only did he feel them but he endured them fully never giving into sin, so He experienced them even deeper then we have, because in our sinfulness we have given into them, where Christ stood, bearing the weight of OUR sin, and carried them to the cross. But he knows. He knows fully. And he symphatizes with you, he grows near to you in them. You guys, Jesus died for us while we were still sinners. Not afterwards. His heart was for you in your sinfulness. There is nothing you can do that would turn Him away from you. In truthfulness, Jesus knows the depth of your sinfulness greater than you do, because he paid the depth of punishment for your sinfulness when you never could. Yet, he still yearns for you. He YEARNS for his children. His deepest longing, who He is, yearns for you and for me in all of our messiness. That is the Heart of Christ.

But he doesn’t just stop longing for us then. He’s not your childhood crush who you longed for and then once you started holding hands in the hallway, you realize that relationships are complicated and hard and its more fun to play with the boys during recess so you move on.... No, He continues longing for us. So much so, that he continues his work for us even in this moment.

Hebrews 7:25 says,

“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost, those who draw near to God through Him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

Theres a few things I want to focus on in this text, but the first is the last part of that statement, that Christ lives to make intercession for them. Intercession implies that there is a third party to come between two others and to make a case for one. In this case, he is making our case to God the Father, in the fullness of his atoning sacrifice. So intercession is the application of the work that was accomplished on the Cross.

Dane Ortlund writes this about this text, “This is the explicit acknowledgement that we Christians are ongoing sinners, that Christ continues to intercede on our behalf in heaven because we continue to fail here on Earth. He does not just forgive us through his work on the cross and then hope we make it the rest of the way.”

Guys do you get whats happening. Jesus right now is praying for you. He is talking about you to God the Father and is covering you with his overwhelming forgiveness, mercy, and love.

Lastly he saves to the uttermost. Or literally in the Greek to the most most. His heart is to save to the most.

“God’s forgiving, redeeming, restoring touch reaches down into the darkest crevices of our souls, hose places where we are most ashamed, most defeated. More than this: those crevices of sin are themselves the places where Christ loves us the most. His heart willingly goes there. His heart is most strongly drawn there. He knows us to the uttermost, and he saves us to the uttermost, because his heart is drawn out to us to the uttermost. We cannot sin our way out of his tender care”

2020 has been a tough year, and for many of us, I do not believe the difficulties are quite over. Personally, I have walked through a depth of loneliness, loss, pain this year that I have not known since I started my walk with Christ. There has been times I feel like I have been abandoned… and I know you feel that too.. There has been times I felt like I wanted to hide away in those deep crevices of my sin of my loneliness… But let me tell you something. Be ready to be shocked by this , because we serve a God that our sin causes Him to be all the more ready to plunge into our hearts. And A God that greets our messiness with beautiful, open arms of a loving embrace. A God that nor height nor depth, nor sin, nor death, could separate us from. A God that died for you to know Him. A God that lives to make intercession for you. A God that yearns for you to know Him Fully through His Word and through who He is. A God who has revealed himself fully in Christ Alone. A God who yearns for you simply because He loves you and he desires what is best for you and what is most glorious for Him. The deeper our pain and anguish is Church, the deeper Christ’s heart is for us and the deeper He will go to fully know and redeem you. Can you bow your heads with me…

I challenge you to pray as I pray this prayer over us.

What gift of grace is Jesus my redeemer There is no more for heaven now to give He is my joy, my righteousness, and freedom My steadfast love, my deep and boundless peace

To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus For my life is wholly bound to His Oh how strange and divine, I can sing: all is mine Yet not I, but through Christ in me

The night is dark but I am not forsaken For by my side, the Saviour He will stay I labour on in weakness and rejoicing For in my need, His power is displayed

To this I hold, my Shepherd will defend me Through the deepest valley He will lead Oh the night has been won, and I shall overcome Yet not I, but through Christ in me

No fate I dread, I know I am forgiven The future sure, the price it has been paid For Jesus bled and suffered for my pardon And He was raised to overthrow the grave

To this I hold, my sin has been defeated Jesus now and ever is my plea Oh the chains are released, I can sing: I am free Yet not I, but through Christ in me

Amen.

Church let us stand, and proclaim boldly in Christ Alone is our hope, our joy, our salvation. In Christ Alone is all of who I am, and all of whose I am.