February 12, 2006

Family & Friendship Sunday

(Skit) Our text tells us:  “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.”  When Christ is Lord in your heart, that is something of consequence that makes everything else inconsequential!

We are thinking and talking about HEARTS today.  You’re going to see a lot of hearts the next few days… Valentine’s Day is two days away!  It is all about love and hearts.  We’re going to be talking about hearts today, too, as we talk about these two verses from 1 Peter 3.  We are going to be talking about setting apart Christ as Lord in our hearts.  I will be using three things: a strawberry, an onion, and a tomato, to help explain and apply our Bible text…

The Strawberry

When Adelaide Bolton gets older, she’ll be able to tell people she almost died from a small, broken heart.  Adelaide was born November 18 with a rare heart defect that restricts blood flow and makes it difficult to breathe.  But Adelaide faced even greater challenges because her due date was this month!  She was born 2 ½ months premature and weighed less than 3 pounds.

Her heart was only the size of a strawberry, like this one.  Much too small for surgeons to use their fingers to repair the defects.  But if they had waited for Adelaide to get older, her condition would have deteriorated.  So, just three days after she was born, Adelaide, who then weighed only 2.4 pounds, had open-heart surgery on her little strawberry-sized heart.

Adelaide is one of the tiniest children to undergo this procedure.  The process included repairing a hole in the heart between the two ventricles and attaching a donated human pulmonary artery to replace her blocked pulmonary valve.  Today, Adelaide is off the ventilator, weighs 4 pounds, and is recovering well.  She’s even bottle feeding.  And her strawberry-sized heart, even though hooked up to machines, is beating.

As I think about this precious little girl, I can’t help but ask: “How can a child be born with such a thing?  Her little strawberry heart having a hole in it.  Bleeding.  Suffering.  Dying.  And though she has made it through one successful surgery, she has 3 or 4 more to go through as she grows up.  How is that fair?  How could God allow someone to enter this world with such a defect?  With a strawberry-sized heart that has a hole in it?

But Scripture reminds me that this wasn’t God’s idea.  He didn’t create us to be born like this.  He had designed us to be perfect.  It was something our first parents did that messed that all up.  They disconnected themselves from God’s perfection and love by deciding to follow their own will instead of his.  And so they disconnected themselves, and us, their children, from the perfect bodies and souls and strawberry-sized hearts we were meant to be born with.

And so, Adelaide’s little strawberry-sized heart reminds me of our hearts.  This little, bleeding, heart that is hooked up to tubes reminds me of the sick and dying condition of our own hearts.  Just as this baby was born with a strawberry-sized defective heart with a hole in it, we are born with hearts that have holes in them – God-shaped holes.  Our hearts, and now I’m not talking about the strawberry-sized ones we are born with, but our spiritual hearts, are from birth spiritually bleeding, dying, and imperfect.

From birth, our hearts no longer want to do what God wants.  They are defective hearts passed down to us from our first parents who decided not to do what God wants.  So now our hearts want to lead us away from God to do other things.  God says to love…I choose to hate.  God instructs: “Forgive.”…I opt to get even.  God tells us to have self-control… I promote self-indulgence.  God promises He loves me… but my heart is filled with fear.  Like Adam and Eve as soon as they disobeyed, I am afraid.  There is a hole in my heart where God should be, and my heart longs for Him, but is filled with fear if He isn’t there.

The strawberry-sized heart that I was born with will not last forever because the heart I was born with that should have God in it, didn’t.  And friends, when your heart doesn’t have God in it, the inconsequential things in life will become very consequential to you.  Frustrations will get the best of you.  Bad days will stop you in your tracks.  Big challenges become huge reasons for depression.  You will have all sorts of problems you can’t handle.  And, your heart will be filled with fear and guilt because the hole in it that should have God there doesn’t!

In October of 1347, a Genoese fleet returned from the Black Sea, carrying in its cargo the death sentence for Europe.  By the time the ships landed in Messina, Italy, most of the sailors were dead.  The few who survived wished they hadn’t.  Fever racked their bodies.  Festering boils erupted on their skin.  Authorities ordered the vessels out of the harbour, but it was too late.  Flea-infested rats had already scampered down the ropes into the village, and the bubonic plague had come to Europe.  Within 5 years, 25 million people, one third of Europe’s population, had died.  Three centuries later it still raged.  As late as 1665 an epidemic left 100,000 Londoners dead, taking 7000 lives a week, until a bitter, yet mercifully cold winter killed the fleas.

No cure was known.  No hope was offered.  The infected counted their days.  The Black Plague would have to be one of history’s worst afflictions.  But not the worst.  The disease was horrific.  Disastrous.  But humanity’s deadliest?  No.  The Bible reserves that title for a darker blight, an older pandemic that makes the Black Plague seem like a cold sore.  No culture avoids, no nation escapes, no person sidesteps the infection of sin.  Blame the bubonic plague on the Yersinia pestis bacterium.  Blame the plague of sin on a godless decision.

Blame the fact that a baby is born with a defective heart on the fact that sin has destroyed our world.  You think you’re immune because your heart is whole and beating?  Think again.  The jealousy you feel.  The anger, impatience, and frustration that has gotten the best of you.  Your habit of putting your own needs before others.  Husbands, the times you have ignored your wives.  Wives, the times you have made your husband’s job difficult.  Children, the times you have not obeyed those in authority.  Your rebellious actions.  Your lustful thoughts.  Your discontent.  All these things prove that your heart came into this world sick, bleeding, with a hole begging for God to fill it.

The Onion

But now we have to talk about God’s heart.  And that’s where the ONION comes in.  The heart of God is like an onion.  An onion is known for being STRONG.  Its odor is powerful, so much so, that it can even bring you to tears.  The heart of God is also strong.  God’s powerful heart can bring you to tears when you hear about the way that his heart beats for you.  An onion is FLAVOURFUL.  It takes something good and makes it better.  It brings delight to those who love it.  God’s heart is that way.  The AROMA of an onion fills the whole house when it is being used in cooking, and it penetrates the whole dish it is being used in.  And so, God is everywhere, filling his whole creation with his loving heart, penetrating right into our own hearts.  Onions add spice and LIFE to food.  God’s heart adds life to us, his heart is life-giving.  Finally, if you were to take this onion, and begin peeling away the layers, what would you find?  You would find the same exact thing all the way through, layer after layer.  It never changes.  And so, the heart of God is the SAME all the way through, layer after layer.  He is eternal.  He never changes.

Especially in the way that He forgives us.  God hates sin and promises to punish it.  He has never changed his mind about that.  His heart wants nothing to do with sin.  But that great-big-onion-heart of God’s is also full of love – all the way through!  God’s heart has led Him to forgive us for all our sins.  All of them.  Those times you were selfish?  Forgiven.  The times you gossiped?  Forgiven.  The times you walked by without helping?  Forgiven.  Your wicked thoughts?  Forgiven.  Layer after layer, you find the same thing.  Forgiveness!  Because God’s big, powerful, loving heart is the same, layer after layer.  Full of love and forgiveness.

How could a God whose powerful heart hates sin and never changes also love us?  How could He just forget about those sins that He hates so much?  He didn’t!  He punished them!  He just didn’t punish us.  Verse 18 says: “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.  He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit.”

What if a miracle worker had done something comparable with the Black Plague?  Imagine a man born with bubonic resistance.  The bacterium can’t penetrate his system unless he allows it to.  And, incredibly, he does.  He makes this offer to the sick: “Touch my hand.  Give me your disease, and receive my health.”  Those who are suffering look at his extended hand and touch it.  True to the man’s word, bacteria pass from their system into his.  But their relief spells his pain.  Fever and boils attack him.  And as the healed stand in awe, the disease bearer hobbles away.  Our history books tell no such story.  But our Bible does.  Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.  This is exactly what Jesus did!  He took away the thing that makes our hearts sick.  He took away our sins.  And this tells us what the loving onion Heart of God is really like.  Layer after layer, all the way through!

The Tomato

Finally, the TOMATO.  What does a tomato have to do with all of this?  Besides being about the size that most of your adult hearts are now, a tomato reminds us what our hearts are like now as children of God.  When you set apart Christ as Lord in your heart, when you trust in Jesus for your salvation, when the Holy Spirit brings your dead heart to life through the Word of God, when the Lord makes your heart his home, it is much like a tomato.

A tomato grows on a vine.  That is its life source.  Our heart’s vine, its life source, is Jesus.  And because this tomato is connected to this vine, it has become a bountiful piece of fruit.  It is living.  Life-giving.  Filled with life-giving food.  It testifies to the power of our Creator, because it is something He brought to life.  Likewise, our hearts with Christ in them are filled with life.  They are alive, and we can produce the fruit of thankfulness in our lives.  We can now live selfless lives instead of selfish lives.  We can now love others instead of leaving them alone.  We now have a way to keep the inconsequential things of life in their place.  We can put God first in our lives and give Him a home in our hearts.  And we can also share this life with others!

You see, the tomato also has SEEDS in it.  And when these seeds are planted, God uses them to produce new life.  You and I now have the privilege of sharing the wonderful news about God’s great big loving heart with others!  We have the privilege of passing on that life we have been given!  When others see how bountiful our fruit is, they are going to want an answer for why that is.  Hearts with Christ in them should “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”  Your heart is ready.

You may have to (drop tomato!) leave your comfort zone!  You have to plant those seeds.  It might not always be easy as you are speaking about Jesus to people whose strawberry-sized hearts want nothing to do with it.  But God has prepared you and your tomato heart to tell others about his big loving heart. To tell others about Jesus!  So plant those seeds!  Share new life!

Do I have to tell you how important it is?  300 years after the Black Plague first entered Europe, it finally reached the tiny village of Eyam, England.  George Viccars, a tailor, unpacked a parcel shipped from London.  As he opened it, he released plague-infested fleas.  Within four days he was dead and the village was doomed.  The people of Eyam were quarantined and left to die alone.  But to everyone’s amazement, they survived!  Half the residents resisted the disease!  How was that possible?  They all breathed it in!  How did they survive?  Lineage.  Through DNA studies of descendants, scientists later found proof of a disease-blocking gene.  The plague, in other words, could not kill people with this gene.  All because they had the right parents.

What was the secret for surviving the Black Plague?  Have the right ancestry.  What is the secret for surviving the Sin Plague?  Have the right ancestry.  Friends, with God, we have the right ancestry!  We have the right spiritual Father!  Our family tree has been changed from that of Adam to that of God.  Your hearts can stop belonging to sin and bleeding and dying when they become the home of our loving God!  When the Holy Spirit brings you to faith!  When you trust in Jesus as your Savior!  Friends, In your Hearts Set Apart Christ as Lord!   Amen.

-Excerpts of Black Plague illustrations taken from Come Thirsty by Max Lucado.  W. Publishing Group.  2004.
-Strawberry, Onion, Tomato analogy borrowed from Peter Kruschel with permission.

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