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The M3 - Monday Morning Mail for the Third Sunday in Advent
Holiday Heart Check
Yesterday's recorded sermon focused on verse four from the reading from Isaiah 35: "Say to those who have an anxius heart, 'Be strong,; fear not! Behold, your God will come with bengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you." I made the comment that we have a lot of different ways to assess our physical hearts and I displayed an image for each: electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, stress test, CT Scan, and Coronary Angiogram, xrays taken with a heart catheter. Some of us have experienced these tests. Our world has developed all kinds of ways to assess the health of our physcial heart.
I then put up an origianl translation of the Hebrew text: "Say to those hasty of heart, 'Be strong and do not be afraid. Behod our God of vengeance coes. The recompense of God is coming and he will save you." I highlighted the words hasty of heart. To have a hasty heart is to have a fickle heart. Heart means the core of who you are--upon what is your attention, desire. The idea is that one second your attention, desire is upon this and then the next it's upon that. To have a hasty heart is to switch back and forth from different objecs of trust. The Bible and God sees this as a problem--I showed a cartoon of a sick heart at his point, calling to mind what the Apostle Paul says in Epheisans 2:1: we are dead in our sin! We need a full heart transplant as Exekiel 36:26 tells us: "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." From Jesus we receive this heart of flesh. We breathe anew. We have life again, fully restored to a perfect relationship with God.
Our holiday heart check reveals that we have a dead heart, a heart of stone--like Pharoah. God gives us the heart of flesh in Christ, fullly and properly beating, in sync with Him!