The Tender Heart

Introduction

This morning, we are continuiing our series out of Ephesians and specifically, we are in the practical section of this letter that deals with living out this new life that we have in Christ. Two weeks ago, I spoke about how we are transformed by the renewing of our minds and how we are to think about the world through the mind of Christ. Last week, P. Sergio spoke about controlling our anger and harnessing our emotions so that it serves the redemptive purposes of God. Today, I want to bridge the gap between these two messages and look at how we can keep our hearts soft rather than being hardened by indifference, apathy, or even hatred. Turn with me to Ephesians 4.

Ephesians 4:17–20 ESV

Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!—

Ephesians 4:31–32 ESV

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Body

As we think about these verses, I want to focus mainly on three points:

What does hardness of heart look like today?

What does a tender heart look like?

What is the root cause of a hardened heart?

In generations past, I think it was much easier to detect the hardness of heart in people. In a world that emphasized truth and reason, feelings and emotions were often seen as a luxury or secondary at best becasue of the dangers of becoming irrational. However, the unintended effect of this focus on human reason was the callousness of heart that it created. People became steely in their emotions, even to the point of being unable to cry at the passing of a loved one. That phenomena is something I can relate with because when my grandmother, who for the most part raised me passed away, I could not shed a tear even if I had wanted to. In that moment, I completely rationalized my grief away: death is a neccessary part of life, my personal sadness is not helpful to the current situation, at least she’s free from her pain. From that experience, I knew that there was something wrong, not with my tear ducts, but with my heart. I had recently become a Christian at that time and it was fairly evident to me that there was a problem that I needed to address. I could easily compare the difference between my response to the death of a loved one and the response of Jesus to the death of his friend, Lazarus which is recorded in the shortest verse of the Bible: Jesus wept. Even though Jesus knew that He would raise his friend from the dead, He still had a tenderness of heart to the point of weeping.

When the apostle Paul writes about callousness in this passage, it literally means being past the point of feeling. Fortunately, over the many years of walking with the Lord and through the healing power of the Holy Spirit, my heart has become more soft, not perfect but lightyears better than it was before. I can testify to the fact that God is able to turn hearts of stone into a heart of flesh. I can now cry freely at appropriate times but being past the point of feeling describes much more than our responses to sad life events, it also includes our response to sin, loss of moral sensitivity, and even the inability to discern the difference between healthy emotions and toxic ones. When the passage talks about being given over to sensuality, it teaches us that the hardened heart still feels things but it’s uncontrolled in its desires. For example, there is a fine line between the appropriate desire for a spouse and the uncontrolled sexual passions that lead to a host of evils. And in this generation the line between what are appropriate feelings and those feelings that come from a hardened heart is easy to blur.

During my years in seminary, many of my professors warned us that we would be entering a world in transition. That the currents of post-modern, post-Englightenment, and post- Christian thought would begin to sweep through this nation. I remember not taking their warning very seriously becasue I could not imagine a world where truth and reason would be subservient to feelings but here we are. The pandemic, social media, and the politics of our country have pretty much made truth irrelevant and has quickly brought us into the era of feelings. The mantra of our society is whatever I feel is what is true to me and I am going to surround myself with people who think and feel the same way. In a world, where feelings are elevated over reason, hardness of heart is more difficult to detect becasue we are constantly examing the things we feel and it never dawns on us that we might actually be struggling more than we know with a hardness of heart. Let me try to parse this out a bit.

It makes sense that in a society that values feelings as it’s hightest currency, the ability to share in those feelings is a high commodity. This is why empathy is placed so high on the list of character traits among modern secular psychologists. I don’t know if you have ever thought about the difference between sympathy and empathy but there is an important distinction:

Sympathy is the ability to understand another person’s feeling.

Empathy is the ability to enter into another person’s feeling, and vicerally feel what they feel.

If you are psychologist from a modern school of thought, it’s easy to see how empathy is elevated over sympathy. Sympathy has more to do with a rational understanding of another person’s pain. I understand why that person feels that way and I will symapthize with them. But the shortcoming of sympathy is that it it can feel like a moralistic duty, it places the sympthasizer over the one receiving the condolence, and it creates pity, and no one wants to receive pity.

So empathy becomes the most caring thing that we can do in our culture, because we are literally entering into another’s persons feelings. We are trying to share them as equally as possible so that there is no pity. And this all sounds so wonderful because now we are feeling each other. And in our minds, we think this is the furthest thing from having a hardened heart. But that is simply not true. What is the danger of being overly empathetic? You enter into another person’s emotional pain but you can’t get out of it, you get lost in their pain, and you begin to identity their feelings as your own. It sounds so beautiful but it’s not. I finally watched the movie Inception a few months back and I thought about this concept of entering into someone else’s dream state. A dream is completely irrational but it feels real and in the movie at least, trying to go into to someone’s feelings is incredibly dangerous becasue you can lose yourself in it, without even realizing it.

And the subtle trap of being overly empathetic is that you begin to identify yourself with a very small subset of people that you are empathetic towards and you harden your heart to everything and everyone else. Last summer, we rightfully empathized with the victims of police brutality but becasue of the limitations of human empathy, some could not empathize with good police officers that were unfairly attacked, nor could they empathize with business owners (many of them minorities) who lost everything in the non-violent protests, nor could they empathize with those didn’t share their political and ideological views. Empathy like sympathy is a mixed bag and it is no guarantee against a hardened heart, in fact it can create callousness in the heart in a more dangerous way.

It is fair to note that neither sympathy nor empathy are considered to be strong biblical values. In fact, empathy as a concept was only defined in the past 100 years in the field of psychology because it was not something that was valued as a separate virtue of its own. Becasue in the end, both sympathy and empathy are mere stepping stones to a far more Christ-like virtue, the feeling of compassion. Compassion takes empathy and sympathy a critical step further.

When you are compassionate, you feel the pain of another (i.e., empathy) and you understand the reason for that pain (i.e., sympathy), but then you do your best to bring the person out of their suffering.

It’s been duly noted that empathy that is not consistenly turned into compassion actually becomes toxic and erodes your happiness. Some years ago, a Jewish rabbi and therapist by the name of Edwin Friedman warned us about the fallacy of empathy and gave some characteristics of the overly-empathetic:

They tend to be easily hurt and are given to victim attitudes

They are highly reactive and overly serious

Their intent is always “innocently provacative” but they don’t recognize their destructive intent

They tend to be easily stampeded and panicked into group think

They are unforgivingly relentless and invulnerable to insight

We certainly saw a lot of this in both non-believers and among Christians across the nation. These were the latent attitudes of the heart that led to much of the bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and slander that became so commonplace in the news and on our social media feeds. Rage and anger and clamor are not expressions of your authentic self, they are by-products of a hardened heart but as the apostle Paul reminds us, that is not the way we learned Christ!

This brings us to the second question of what a tender heart looks like? Oddly enough, the Greek word that is translated as tenderhearted in your English Standard Version has nothing to do with the heart becasue it literally means to have good bowels of compassion. And for obvious reasons, I didn’t want to title this message, “The Good Bowel” becasue I’m not too concerned about the health of your gut. But we do have similar idioms in the English language that place the center of our emotions not in the heart per se but in the stomach. We say things like, “I have a sinking feeling in my stomach” or “That’s a gut wrenching loss”. Not to bring back bad memories but think about the rejection you received from a job that you really wanted or the bad break up with someone that you really cared about. You probably felt those things in the gut. I’m sure that we have all had something happen that we deeply cared about, and it stirred deep emotions within us. When the Warriors lost game 7 to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the season they won the most games of any team in history, it felt like someone punched me in the stomach.

I think what is a bit sad is that I care more about a basketball team that has very little to do with me but those things I should care deeply about, the things that should cause compassion from my core, I’m often hard and calloused towards. When the apostle Paul is calling us to be tenderhearted, he is actually writing this in the context of the church and calling us to be compassionate towards our brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul was a man who loved the church intensely becasue he understood that Christ gave his life for the church.

Philippians 1:8 ESV

For God is my witness, how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus.

In the gospels, we see that Jesus was a man of compassion not merely sympathy or empathy. In the miraculous feeding of the four thousand, we see the compassion of Jesus Christ at work.

Matthew 15:32 ESV

Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.”

Jesus sympathized with the crowds understood that they didn’t have strength to make it home. He also empathized them and shared in their hunger. He didn’t have a secret stash of food for himself given by the fact that he literally had to ask his disciples if there was any food left to hand out. But Jesus didn’t stop there, out of compassion, He was unwilling to send the people away hungry.

Unlike empathy that is limited in scope, compassions is something you can have for anyone in pain. If you think about it, Jesus had compassion on such a wide range of people. Whether they were rich or poor, Jew or Samaritan, religious or irreligious, young or old, Jesus had compassion on everyone he encountered in his ministry. Compassion is the natural overflow of a tender heart, the heart that is occuppied by the indewlling presence of the Spirit of Christ. And that heart holds no grudge and is quick to forgive and is able to love even the most difficult people.

But as we all discovered this past year, it’s extremely hard to keep our hearts soft. And this brings us to our final question of what is the root cause of the hardness of heart. For the non-believer, it makes perfect sense that they are hardened by the fact that they don’t know the love of God but why do we as Christians become hardened all the same?

Hebrews 3:12–15 ESV

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”

This is the exact warning that Paul is giving the Ephesians and to us, don’t live like the Gentiles in the futility of their thinking nor in the hardness of heart. We need to take care because it’s easy to slide into unbelief and fall away from the living God. It happens all the time, it happens to people we thought we knew, it happens to those who seemed like strong believers. I’ve know friends who were pastors essentially fall away from the faith. It can happen to you and it can happen to me.

Octavius Winslow who was a contemporary of Charles Spurgeon, probably has written the best book I’ve read on how to maintain spiritual fervency and he warns us in that book:

If there is one consideration more humbling than another to a spiritually minded believer, it is, that, after all that God had done for him…there should still exist in the heart a principle, the tendency of which is to secret, perpetual, and alarming departure from God.

And the root cause of all of this backsliding is the deceitfulness of sin. You can be in the church for years and years, you can serve, learn all the doctrines, even be in the ministry and all the while your heart is becoming harder and harder. That is how deceptive sin can be. Without even realizing it, there are layers and layers of callousness that are being built up and suddenly you find yourself past the point of repentance, past the point of heeding God’s voice, past the point of feeling any sense of yearning for the things of God.

The analogy of building calluses on your body is a great analogy of the impact of sin on the heart. Anyone who has played a string instrument knows how painful it is to put your fingers onto those metal strings the first time but with constant contact, you build calluses and, you no longer feel the pain. It is the exact same process with sin. Initially it’s painful to sin but overtime it becomes easier and easier because your heart becomes hardened to it.

There are some early symptoms of the onset of this spiritual heart disease:

In your reading of the Word of God, there is no sense of reverence. No submission to what it says. No real sense that all Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, that you might be made perfect, and equipped for every good work.

In your prayer times, there is no sense that you are drawing near to the very throne of grace, there is no sense of fellowship with the Holy Spirit, no real confession of sin, and no real gratitude for what Christ has done for you.

You have little or no love towards other believers. When your heart is occupied with the love of Christ, you end up loving what He loves. And He loved the church enough to give up his life for her.

Galatians 6:10 ESV

So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

What is the remedy for our hardened hearts? When the Lord calls, respond to him and return to him while you still can.

Psalm 27:8 ESV

You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.”