by Heather Biggs
Have you ever, completely out of the blue, been swamped with verses about a topic, and you have absolutely no idea why?! The last couple of weeks, I seem to have been inundated with verses about hearts! I’ve had Bible studies that talked about hearts being hardened, Sunday school lessons about making hearts clean or good for growing seeds, devotionals talking about God’s heart breaking or being filled with compassion. The Bishop’s sermon last week talked about hearts changing! I’ve even been marking exam questions about the heart!
Maybe I need eyes to see, along with these hearts, because I’m still not quite sure what God’s angle is! But all the same, we can still take a quick checkup and examine these hearts!
Carrying on in the book of Zechariah at Bible study, we have talked about how the Israelites hardened their hearts for years in exile in Babylon. They fasted and prayed and commemorated the fall of the temple, but at the first opportunity to get out of these religious practices, they wanted to take it! Their hearts were hardened to the point that they had forgotten why they started fasting in the first place. I felt a little called out here, because I know I have felt the same way, by the second hour of the Good Friday 3-hour service…
As a complete contrast to that, in Children’s church on Sunday we had Jesus showing compassion on the crowd, preaching to and feeding the 5000, as His own heart broke with the death of His cousin. A couple of days before that, the lectio 365 talked about Jesus weeping at the death of Lazarus. We like to accuse God of turning His back on us, or being too stoic when we are in pain, but this is just two of many examples where God has shown His “heart” is so much softer than ours.
At the Confirmation service, Bishop Grant raised another heart related point. Prayer changes your heart before it changes your circumstances. I must admit, this line was so novel for me, that it took a solid minute before I was paying attention to the sermon again… The statement is a simple yet profound one. The value of prayer is often called into question by Christians and the world in general. “Thoughts and prayers” is almost considered a joke now days, a cop out. But the value of prayer is laid bare here. We pray first to change our hearts, our outlook and attitude. There is no point in praying for change when the change will not be appreciated. (We see that with the Israelites prayers being answered, only for them to turn around and complain all over again!) Whether its praying for a heart replacement for ourselves or for others, once hearts are softened, God’s presence in the situation becomes clear.
Lastly, our king calls us to expose our hearts. Do you remember the wheat and the weeds service a couple of weeks ago? Where we were all called to pray verse 23 and 24 of Psalm 139.
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
How many of us remembered to ask God, where we need to clean out the weeds from our hearts? My weeding process definitely stalled… Maybe what God has been trying to say to me with all the heart imagery, is its time to reanalyze my heart. Where have I slipped into habits and lost track of value? Where have my acts of worship, my praise, my prayers, come from a heart that has been hardened with years of repetition? Where does my heart need to change before it can appreciate change?
I guess I will challenge myself (and you too!), again, to invite God in for a full inspection. I hope the heart imagery does keep coming, until I have eyes to see!