Central Presbyterian Church
February 18, 2007

‘A Heart Won Over by Jesus’ – Rev. Tom Boone
2 Samuel 6:1-5, 16; Acts 5:27-32

Not so long ago I came across a story that makes a good illustration for today's message. Do you remember the movie, “The Wizard of Oz”? One thing the movie left out from the book was the plight of the tin man. Once upon a time he had been a real man who loved a Munchkin woman but rather than marry her he decided to wait until everything was just right. He put his heart on hold until his mind had figured everything out. So he started building a cottage and one day the Wicked Witch came along and changed everything. She hated his loving heart so she cast spells on him to make him have accidents. One by one each part of his real body needed to be replaced with artificial parts made from tin. Eventually he had an accident that split his body into two parts, including his heart, and when he was being fitted for his new torso his heart was left out. He was as strong as metal, but without his heart he had lost touch with his love. By the time Dorothy and the scarecrow came upon the tin man he had been rusted solid for a year. And in the book he says, “It was a terrible thing to undergo, but during the year I stood there I had time to think that the greatest loss I had known was the loss of my heart. While I was in love I was the happiest man on earth; but no one can love who has not a heart, and so I am resolved to ask Oz to give me one. If he does, I will go back to the Munchkin maiden and marry her…for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.”

In his book, Waking the Dead, Christian author John Eldredge writes that the heart is a central emphasis in the Bible. Listen to this list of adjectives that can describe the heart: it can be troubled, pierced, grieved, broken, cheerful, joyful, glad, forgetful, stubborn, wandering, proud, hardened, wicked, perverse, steadfast, true, upright, valiant and passionate. Is it any wonder that whenever we think something’s happened to our faith it happened in our heart first? Eldridge’s conviction is that the condition of our heart becomes the condition of our faith.

There are lots of us who go to church our whole lives, who pray when we’re down and even when we’re up. We serve on church committees, maybe even serve as deacons and elders or sing in the choir. Speaking for myself, I can’t remember a time that I’ve not been a Christian. But, there have been times when my heart wasn't captive to Jesus. And there’s no one that can tell me that the way I was as a Christian then and the way I am as a Christian now is the same. I’ve seen Christians wake up one morning and know that there’s more to faith than what they’ve had thus far. Some people have an irresistible experience of grace in their lives at Cursillo or other spiritual renewal events such as Women of Faith and Promise Keepers. Others experience God in nature over a summer vacation. Some of us find grace at the bottom of life’s pit and are brought out of that pit by God and our faith is never the same. No one can predict when the Holy Spirit will jump start the heart, but when He does we can choose either to stay the way we have been, or to let Him go ahead with the work He wants to do.

These experiences of heart-filled faith are reflections of what we read about David and the apostles today. David responded to God because he was truly thankful for what God had given him without his having done anything to merit it. He experienced God’s goodness even though there was plenty of hardship. God anointed him King, but Saul still tried to kill him, to name one thing. And David could have responded to God in a way that seemed culturally acceptable for a King, but the faith in his heart didn’t want to compromise. Michal thought David’s response was ridiculous, shameful, and improper. But, David’s heart had been completely won over by God and in the same way God showed him uncompromising love, he was going to respond to God in an uncompromising, whole-hearted manner. For David, there was no other option.

In Acts 5 Peter stands before a group of religious leaders who want Peter to compromise his heart by not talking about Jesus publicly. It just wouldn’t do to proclaim faith in Jesus when the religious authorities had found Jesus worthy of a criminal’s death. Instead, Peter stands before them and says that Jesus’ lordship was too real for him to compromise. His heart had been won over by Jesus, and Peter couldn’t bear the idea of keeping quiet about Jesus as Lord and Savior. As we all know, Peter was not always like this, but there were some rather phenomenal events in his life that transformed his heart.

Acts 5 begins with the death of Ananias and Saphira. A famine had struck Jerusalem and the Christian community at the end of Acts 4 had decided to pull its resources together in order to help those who had nothing. Some who had homes even went so far as to sell their property and give the money to the church for the sake of the community. It was an act of great faith and compassion by people of means. Ananias and Saphira sold their house, too, but unlike others they secretly kept some of the money for themselves. They brought money to Peter, and said it was the whole amount from their house sale, but it was a lie, and Peter caught them in it. Now if you think that the moral of this story is that lying in church will get you killed then you’ve missed the point. I want you to notice a couple of points. Ananias and Saphira didn’t have to sell their house, and they didn’t have to bring anything from the sale to Peter. If their heart wasn’t in it, they shouldn’t have done it. They brought their offering to the Lord, but it was an offering stained by deceit. It was an act of a heart motivated by the Evil One rather than the Holy One, so Peter says to them, “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” (v. 3). They died on the spot.

Events like that change someone's faith perspective. Not just the stunning deaths, but the miracle of generosity in people selling all they owned for the benefit of the growing and needy Christian community. By the time we get to Acts 5, God had allowed Peter to tell people about Jesus in languages he didn’t know, heal people miraculously by his shadow falling over them, and seen thousands of people turn their lives over to Jesus. You just don’t walk away from these kind of experiences and say “Gee, that was interesting.” Peter’s heart held a uncompromising conviction about Jesus he hadn’t known before. And it’s this heart that gave him the strength to speak the words we read in 5:29, “We must obey God rather than any human authority”, even if that meant imprisonment, or ultimately death. Peter came to realize that the heart understands what the mind struggles to comprehend, that Jesus is a Message worthy of controversy caused by an uncompromising devotion to Jesus. Jesus did not compromise in his love for us, and a heart won over by Jesus will not compromise itself to the world anymore.

Our world is filled with challenges to our faith. One thing we face is an increasing amount of public policy targeting our Christian faith. People want to remove God from the pledge of allegiance on account of it not being part of the original pledge. It wasn’t added until 1954, but it was added as a witness to our country’s need to rely on God as the most powerful resource during times of peace and war, as Eisenhower suggested. We are encouraged to consider the celebration of Kwanza during Christmas, but did you know that Kwanza was created as the atheistic response to what one man considered Christian foolishness during Christmas? Christians get a bad rap in Universities where religious studies can speak much about Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and any other religious expression, but mention Jesus as Lord and you’re liable to censure.

Why? Because we live in a culture that professes tolerance to be its greatest virtue. It may be wrong to steal these days, but to be intolerant is a grave sin. It may be wrong to kill, but let’s at least be tolerant about the killer's psychological and behavioral background. Anna Nicole Smith’s death was a sad ending to a tragic life, but let’s not dare suggest how awful it is that there is a baby with five men claiming to be the father.

I wish it was just the society around us that I could say poses challenges to our uncompromising response to Jesus. Such challenges come from the church, also. I was shocked a while ago to hear people in our own denomination state that we should stop doing evangelism because it’s arrogant to think that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only source of eternal life. The problem with this view is that it’s not what Christ himself said. A part of our own denomination no longer views scripture to be an authority where matters of faith and science disagree; it’s called the More Light movement and it’s growing. The decision in our denomination to reduce missions and missionary support in order to make the bottom line read black while paying administrative salaries is personally grievous to me because of what it says regarding the place in our denomination of taking Jesus to the world. Many mainline churches have replaced the call of Christ to challenge culture with a soothing, inoffensive, and politically-correct message with the result that they’ve lost their prophetic power. We’ve replaced hard spiritual transformation and discipleship with goals that we’d find in any social agency, and then we wonder why the mainline church is struggling to grow.

I’m not arguing that we should all go to prison for what we believe. But, I struggle against a view of faith that compromises Jesus and our faith too much. David had a faith in God that caused controversy among those close to him. Peter’s faith caused controversy among religious authorities. Each of them had hearts won over by the Lord, but that’s what it takes to transform a world that has lost touch with God. If we’re going to make a difference in this world as Christ’s followers, then we need to realize that the heart is where the battle lines have been drawn.

So the question for us, then, is what does it mean to have a heart won over by Jesus? I think of the man I met in seminary who gave up his executive position to receive advanced Christian training and returned to Miami to work in a church as a director for marketplace ministries. I think of the woman I met at a Cursillo renewal group who had been battling with her ex-husband over financing her daughter’s college. She woke up one day and felt that it was okay to give it up and to let God rather than her fighting do the providing. In tears she told us how the peace of God filled her heart in totally new ways. I think of the minister who abandoned his call as a pastor of a large church in order to earn a business degree and work in the marketplace so that he could bring the gospel to laypeople outside the church. I think of my own parents who had so much by the world’s standards and decided that it wasn’t enough, so they gave it all up and served Christ as missionaries in China.

Such amazing stories of people who responded to Jesus with complete surrender are humbling, but let’s not be dismayed by them. How can we be a church that encourages people to experience life with hearts that have been won over by Jesus? If that’s our prayer as a church, then it will happen. I’m not arguing for Central to adopt more programs. It happens by encouraging spiritual renewal among the session and members. Studying together Richard Foster’s “Celebrating the Spiritual Disciplines” or Brennan Manning’s “The Ragamuffin Gospel” are excellent ways to facilitate this. Lent begins next week, so be intentional in your small groups about doing things together that encourage spiritual growth. See the movie “The Passion” together, or another film about Jesus and his life. Commit your families to reading parts of John 13-20 together throughout the seven weeks of Lent. Maybe you can take Thomas AKempis’ book “The Imitation of Christ” or Brother Lawrence’s “Practice of the Presence of God” and read it bit by bit through the days of Lent as a devotional. However small the steps are toward letting Jesus win over your hearts, its just important that you take those steps and Lent is a great time to start. If you’ve allowed your hearts to become distant from the Lord who should be your first love, then I encourage you to do whatever you need to do to experience the joy of having a heart won over by Jesus. This church needs it, the world around you needs it, and you need it lest you become like the tin man who decided that his love could be put off to another day. Hallelujah. Amen.