Wanted: An Honorable Heart
2 Samuel 1:1-6; 1 Corinthians 9:6-11
Rev. Thomas J. Boone, PhD
Central Presbyterian Church, Mobile AL May 15, 2008

As ya’ll know, I’m selling my house, which I’ve discovered provides a plethora of lessons. For example, a house doesn’t really look great until you’re trying to sell it. This is because of the lesson that taking care of the small things can make or break the way a house looks. But, this lesson only leads to another lesson. There’s a time to stop working on the small stuff, and it’s best to make that time before the sun goes down lest the mosquitoes eat you alive. Can you tell that I was thinking about this sermon while I was painting outdoor trim?

I’ve discovered some other interesting applications for life in the selling of one’s home. Trust in God and do not be afraid, especially when the housing market is low, because God has promised that joy comes in the morning. Another one is that clutter not only has to be out of sight, it has to disappear. Gone are the days of hiding things in closed closets or drawers, because people will notice the clutter. But how often do we think it’s enough to just rearrange or hide the clutter when we’re not trying to sell the house? And this question got me to thinking about all the various imperfections I’ve come across that I’ve been content to live with, to put off fixing until another day. One realtor told me just to paint over a few things because “really it’s just about making it look good.”

The more I thought about that statement, the more it bothered me. Case in point: When I was redoing my roof a couple of years ago I found out that the industry standard for a three-tab shingle is five nails per shingle. When I bought the house the roof inspector failed to notice that for an entire section of the roof there were only two nails in the shingles! More significant than this, the roofers discovered a 16 inch beam under the roof that had broken years before from a tree, which had caused a soft spot under the shingles. The house I’m selling has a good roof and everything is fixed, but the house I bought only looked like it had a good roof. When Ivan hit my roof that only looked good failed.

And there’s where the rubber of my house analogies meets the road of our scripture today. We can mask a lot in our lives. We know how to smile at the right times, wear the right clothes, and put on the correct airs. But, what would people see in us if they had the opportunity to peer beyond the dressed up surface? The foundation of our lives, what I will call “the heart,” needs to be right for us to be pleasing to our Lord. And for Christians there’s no greater bottom line than pleasing our Lord.

This is both the challenge and the good news that comes to us by way of 2 Samuel and 2 Corinthians today.

First, let’s look at the account of Saul’s death. Saul was Israel’s first king. They had asked the prophet Samuel to anoint a king and he resisted for a while, but finally relented to their wishes. God showed Samuel a tall, handsome man, who appeared to have natural strength and told Samuel that he was the one to be king of Israel. But, as we all know, Saul was a let down sort of king. He had the apparent exterior, but his heart wasn’t right for the task. He was strong physically, but he often caved in under pressure. He said he could lead God’s people, but he consulted a pagan medium for guidance. He was supposed to be the keeper of the covenant, but not only did he often break it, he refused to admit it when he did. His pride led him into a deadly pursuit after David to the point where he seemed insane with jealousy. It was a jealousy that drove Saul to pursue David at all costs and forced David to flee for his life on several occasions. David had every reason to want Saul dead.

When Samuel anointed David as future king of Israel, the physical appearance couldn’t have been more different than that of Saul. He was the runt of the litter, the ruddy looking shepherd boy who couldn’t fit into the armor of a common soldier. But, check out David’s heart. Despite being anointed future king of Israel David never once attempted to oust Saul through force. When Saul was in a cave with his back turned away from David, David snuck up behind him and despite the encouragement of his friends he didn’t kill him. Instead he tore off a section of Saul’s clothes and later felt badly about it and apologized. On another occasion, David and one of his men named Abishai, snuck into Saul’s camp at night undetected and they stood over Saul while he was asleep. Abishai said to David, “Today God has delivered your enemy into your hands. Now let me pin him to the ground with one thrust of my spear; I won’t strike him twice.” Today he might have said, “Let me waste him, and I’ll do it quickly.” David’s response? “Don’t destroy him! Who can lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?” How do we explain this?

It’s simple, really. David’s heart was honorable before God, and where you saw it most wasn’t in his smile, courage, or superficial niceness. When he had the opportunity to get rid of Saul, David wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t right by God. When someone’s heart is right with God, her or his heart is visibly honorable. That doesn’t mean that person’s perfect, but there’s a desire and orientation toward doing what pleases God, and sometimes that’s not what makes sense.

By the time we get to Saul’s death, then, we shouldn’t be surprised at David’s reaction to the death of the man who had made David’s stressful and fearful for years. Saul, no matter how corrupt his heart had become, remained God’s king over Israel and for David that meant he was untouchable by any other hand save God’s. Honor dictated as much. David knew how to kill, and he was far from weak with fear. The only issue for David with respect to Saul was that as long as Saul was alive he was God’s king and David honored him as such. Folks, we can’t buy honor like that at a mask shop. It’s either there in the heart at the core of our being, or it isn’t. Well, David had it, and that’s what pleased God about David more than anything else.

God desires us to have a heart that has been transformed completely from our base sinful nature into a heart of honor, humility, mercy, and all the other marks of the Spirit-filled Christian. And that’s the point of connection between the story of Saul’s death in 2 Samuel and Paul’s message to the Corinthians. Sure, the application is stewardship, but at the core of the passage Paul’s talking about what an honorable heart looks like.

When it comes to finding our parallel in the ancient church, most scholars regard the churches in Corinth to be it. Corinthians had money, many had property and owned businesses. There was a major Roman port in the city, so it was a place where international travelers frequented along with their goods. Corinth was one of the brighter jewels in that region of the Roman Empire so it was blessed with great architecture, schools, banks, order in the streets, and general peace. Compared to the churches in Corinth many of the other churches in the areas Paul visited had very little.

The churches that Paul planted outnumbered by a long shot those churches that were in Jerusalem, and for a long time the big controversy among these earliest Christians was whether or not someone had to become a Jew before becoming a Christian. To us it makes no sense, but for them it was a real issue. The Christians in Jerusalem had a lot of pride about being Jewish first, and then Christians; so much so that they forced non-Jews to become Jews in order to become Christian. Paul finally had it with this policy and his bitterest arguments came not from non-Christian, skeptical Greeks, but from Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. All that is background for what I’m going to say next.

During Paul’s ministry a famine broke out in Palestine that negatively affected the Christian churches in Jerusalem. It actually served to bring the Jerusalem Christians to their knees in humility, as they had to ask help from the very people they had said were less Christian because of their non-Jewish status. It was an opportunity both for generosity and for a grand “Gotcha.” Who do you think did what? The poor churches Paul knew were the ones who gave the most and Paul used their generosity as the challenge to the wealthy churches in Corinth. The poorer churches decided to show compassion because the Christians in Jerusalem may have been wrong, but they were still God’s people for whom Christ died. If God could show mercy on them, as He had done on all people, then they could do the same in a smaller way. But the Christians in Corinth weren’t buying it and in fact were holding back the money that could do the most good. And evidently those who were giving were saying things like, “Oh, OK, I guess” or perhaps, “I’ll help only if...” or maybe something else we may be familiar with like, “OK, but be sure to let them know I’m doing it even though they’ve treated me like pond scum.” You get the point now, to which Paul was replying when he wrote, “God loves a cheerful giver.” An honorable heart gives when the call is clear that giving is needed because such service is a response to God’s generosity not conditioned on the lack of respect by another.

The message today, then, is that God wants our hearts to be honorable before Him. I don’t know what you’re dealing with in your work, families, church commitments, community involvements, and even personal decisions and behaviors, but in some way each of us can sit and ponder the extent to which we’re being honorable as God would have us be since we’re His representative of grace to the world. It’s an honor that begins in ourselves as we celebrate whom God has made us to be, flows over into our homes, in our church, and among our friends as we celebrate those people whom God has placed in our lives to cause us to grow more into His image, and ultimately flows out amidst those whose only view of Jesus Christ may be the Christ they see in you as we celebrate God’s call upon our lives to make disciples of all nations. Hallelujah. Amen.