You Can Have A New Heart
Our church (like any church) is filled with people who put on smiling faces most of the time and give the appearance that our lives are together. But our church (like any church) is actually full of people who’ve fought sin all week, and sometimes failed. Husbands in our church have struggled or failed at being patient and kind with their wife and kids. Wives have fought being snarky and short with their husbands. Employees have been lazy at the jobs or judgmental of their bosses. We haven’t been good neighbors, but have instead been selfish with our time and energy. We haven’t thought a lot about God, but instead we’ve gone through much of each day living for ourselves.
We all come to church each Sunday as a broken, hurting people. We come broken and hurting, to the only place where we can be healed.
In Mark 3, a man with a crippled hand came to the synagogue on the day that Jesus was teaching. Now, he may not have been there because he really wanted to be healed. He may have been there because the Pharisees wanted him there. They wanted him there, because they wanted to trap Jesus. The Pharisees, the more religious dudes around during Jesus’ time, came to the synagogue that day to look for people breaking rules. Others came that day to be healed. And really, that’s the difference between being a Pharisee and a disciple (follower) of Jesus.
DISCIPLES OF JESUS CONFESS THEIR BROKENNESS
This is exactly what the Pharisees, the religious people, refused to do. They refused to confess that they were sinful, broken, and needed to be saved by someone outside of themselves. They thought that they could muster up enough strength to heal themselves and stop sinning. They thought they’d be healed by practicing self-denial for long enough or following enough rules. But Jesus said that in order to really be healed, you must confess that there’s nothing you can do to heal yourself. Jesus’ way to healing isn’t rule keeping, it’s confessing our sin to death; owning that we are sinful and broken. And until we see ourselves as broken, rule breaking, unholy sinners, we’ll never be Jesus disciples. We’ll be like the Pharisees or the Herodians, who didn’t believe that they needed healing.
As disciples of Jesus, we confess our brokenness to God. When David had sinned, and his soul was in anguish, look what he wrote in Psalm 32: Then I acknowledged my sin to you [God] and did not cover my sin. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin. He confessed it. He prayed, and told God the truth, that he was broken and needed healing. And God did what God’s promised to do. He forgave David.
Disciples of Jesus also confess our sin to each other. Look at what James 5 says: Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. God gives us a picture of what his church, the gathering of his disciples, will look like. It will look like broken people, coming together, and confessing how they are broken to each other. And he says that healing comes from that.
When’s the last time you confessed your brokenness to your husband, your wife, your kids? Not once they found out how you messed up but because you wanted to be healed. When’s the last time you prayed and confessed your brokenness to God?
DISCIPLES OF JESUS TRUST IN JESUS ALONE
That’s really what Jesus was saying at the end of chapter 2 when he said that he was Lord of the sabbath; Lord of the day of rest. The Pharisees were resting, or trusting in the fact that they kept all the laws correctly. They kept God’s sabbath law and rested better than anyone else, and that’s why they were hoping that God would save them and love them. That’s what they were trusting in. But Jesus claimed that he was the Lord of the Sabbath. He ruled that day of rest. It bowed to him. He was claiming to be greater than their religion. They were trusting in religion. He said that their religion bowed to him.
All throughout Jesus’ life he claimed to be greater than religion. He said that he was the true temple. That he was the great high priest. He said that he was the ultimate sacrifice. And guys the reason we don’t have a temple or priests or sacrifices today is that Jesus put an end to those things. All of those things were pointing to him and showing us what he would come to do, including the sabbath. The sabbath was to show us that we would find rest in Jesus alone. So that’s what the Pharisees didn’t get. They thought that the Savior of the world would come and give us the best religion. Jesus didn’t come to give us a religion, he came to give us himself.
We all, by our natures, want religion. We want a system, something that we can do, a plan for self-management. But Jesus says that self-management won’t work in the end. We might have a little success here and there, but we’ll never kill our sinfulness on our own. We can’t heal ourselves, but he’s a physician who can heal us. So we can rest in him alone, and not our effort. But the Pharisees wanted to keep working, keep striving, and not come into the rest that Jesus was offering. At the end of their lives, they’re going to know a lot of stuff about God and have done a lot of stuff for God, but they will have never actually trusted God and experienced the rest they can have in him.
Are you worrying, anxious, scared about whether you’ve done enough to please God. Maybe you’ve had thoughts like, “Ah man I need to repent for one more sin, give more, do more good works.” Maybe you have constant uneasiness or fear about whether you’ve done enough. Look what Jesus said in Matthew 11: “Come to ME, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.” Come to me; Not to work, or religion, or tradition, or rule keeping. Come to me !That’s what it means to be Jesus’ disciple. He’s our sabbath. He’s our rest.
DISCIPLES OF JESUS HAVE NEW HEARTS
It was the hard hearts of the Pharisees that made Jesus so angry in Mark 3:5. So here’s the difference in disciples of Jesus and people who aren’t disciples of Jesus: Their hearts. Jesus’ disciples have soft, healed hearts.
The Pharisees, trusting in law-keeping and judging others, had broken hearts. The way they lived comes from a heart that’s self-righteous and proud, a heart that’s condemning instead of forgiving, and it leads us to love rules more than people. And that same heart is in each of us.
So we need new hearts. We need to be healed to our core. We need hearts that come to God to worship, when the Pharisees came to judge. And this is the best news about Jesus. He doesn’t just heal withered hands, or paralyzed people, or people with fevers. Jesus heals hearts. Look how God promised to do this in Ezekiel 36: I will cleanse you from all your impurities and all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances. God promised that he can heal our hearts. He can take a hard heart, and make it soft. And then the amazing part is he says that once our heart is healed, and he puts his Spirit in us, THAT’s when we have the power and motivation to follow him well and keep his law, because he’s changed us, transformed us.
Have you experienced that? Maybe your heart’s getting tugged at this reading this post. You feel God working on your heart, speaking to you, and you feel the hardness of wanting to resist and push back, not wanting to confess your brokenness, not wanting to trust in Jesus. That’s what the Pharisees felt.
God’s calling us to come to Jesus, confess our brokenness, trust in Jesus, and be healed. You can do that, even for the very first time, right now. Pray to God and confess how you’re broken, trust in who Jesus is and what he’s done, and experience healing that you won’t find anywhere else.