The Heart of the Matter Psalm 51 : 1-19
“Let’s say it’s 4:17 p.m. and you’re driving home alone after an unusually hard day on the job. Not only was the workload extraordinarily heavy, you also had a disagreement with your boss, and no matter how hard you tried - he just wouldn’t see your side of the situation. You’re really upset and the more you think about it the more uptight you become. All of a sudden you start experiencing severe pain in your chest that starts to radiate out into your arm and up into your jaw. You are only about five miles from the hospital nearest your home. Unfortunately you don’t know if you’ll be able to make it that far. What can you do? You’ve been trained in CPR but the guy that taught the course neglected to tell you how to perform it on yourself.”
Thus begins an item which appeared sometime back in the newsletter of the Rochester General Hospital. The item gives you a course of action should you find yourself alone and think that you are having a heart attack. Since many of us are vulnerable to just such an attack, I felt it might be helpful to share this advice. Let me quote:
“Without help, the person whose heart stops beating properly and who begins to feel faint, has only about 10 seconds left before losing consciousness. However, these victims can help themselves by coughing repeatedly and very vigorously. A deep breath should be taken before each cough, and the cough must be deep and prolonged, as when producing sputum from deep inside the chest. A breath and a cough must be repeated about every two seconds without let up until help arrives, or until the heart is felt to be beating normally again. Deep breaths get oxygen into the lungs and coughing movements squeeze the heart and keep the blood circulating.
The squeezing pressure on the heart also helps it regain normal rhythm. In this way, heart attack victims can get to a phone and, between breaths, call for help.” (1)
So, if you’re having a heart attack, start coughing for all you’re worth.
Even if you have heard this before, it never hurts to be reminded. It may save your life. We all want to take care of our hearts.
The heart is an amazing organ. It weighs only about twelve ounces, but if the heart beats at seventy-two beats per minute, it pumps through itself forty-five pounds of blood per minute, 2,700 pounds per hour, and 32.4 tons per day. It is a muscle that never rests except between beats. Every thirty seconds all the blood in the body passes through the heart. It has a grip greater than that of one’s fist. The two ventricles of the heart hold an average of ten ounces of blood which is pumped out at each beat. The heart does about one-fifth of the mechanical work of the body and exerts enough energy each hour to lift its own weight 13,000 feet into the air. (2)
The heart is an amazing organ, but it can have problems, as some of you are painfully aware. The American Heart Association reports that more than 58,000,000 Americans suffer from one or more cardiovascular diseases. Coronary heart disease is the single leading cause of death in the United States. Every 29 seconds someone in this country will suffer a coronary event. Every minute someone will die from heart disease.
Our emotions as well as our lifestyle seem to have an effect on our hearts.
How else do you explain the fact that twenty percent more people have fatal heart attacks on Monday mornings than any other day or time in the week? When you say, “My job is killing me!” you may be speaking a literal truth. Our emotions, our feelings, can affect our overall well being, including the state of our heart. Which brings us to our text for the day. The Psalmist writes, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me . . .”
The Psalmist isn’t praying that God will give him a heart transplant. Not literally, at least. When the Bible speaks of the heart, it is usually not referring to a physical organ at all. Rather it is speaking of the place in our bodies and our brains where our emotions are located. Those emotions are powerful. In some respects emotions are even more powerful than our physical bodies and much, much more powerful than our logical minds.
Father Anthony De Mello once said something that is very wise. He said that people
mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head. “It is actually done by the heart,” says Father De Mello, “which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.” And that’s true. We think we are reasonable people. We always weigh the pros and cons and make a rational decision. Good luck with that.
If that were true, none of us would ever snap at one another or demean one another or sabotage important relationships, or do things that we know are self-destructive. Our emotions are very powerful. That’s why we do so many illogical things.
Thomas Beecher had a clock on the wall of his church that ran consistently slow. Pastor Beecher hung a placard above the clock which read like this: “Don’t blame my hands! The trouble lies deeper!”
And that’s true. The problem is rarely with our hands or with our feet or with our tongue. The trouble lies deeper. The problem is with our heart.
King David of Israel did a very stupid thing. In fact, he did a series of stupid things, as you know. First of all, he got involved with a woman who was married to someone else. Her name, of course, was Bathsheba. Have you ever heard of someone doing something stupid like that? David could marry as many women as he wanted, in fact he did marry quite a few. And he had concubines. He was the king. It was expected. And there were many beautiful single women in his kingdom. Couldn’t he see the difficulty he was making for himself by going after someone else’s wife, especially the wife of one of his most loyal soldiers?
Then, in order to cover up his misdeed, he did something worse. He had the woman’s husband killed in battle. One thing we learn from the sad example of some of our politicians is that the consequences of a cover-up are usually worse than those of the deed itself.
Stupid.
But emotions are powerful. Sometimes they are overwhelming.
Would it surprise you that it was David who wrote this beautiful Psalm? “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my inime thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight . . .” Then a few more verses down we read his sincere plea: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me Do not cast me from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and sustain in me a willing heart.”
David knew he had done wrong.
He had let his heart overrule his brain.
He had let his heart overrule his values.
He had let his heart damage his relationships with those around him
Even more importantly, he had let his heart damage his relationship with God. And so he prays for a new heart.
Friends, that is what some of us need. We need a new heart. We have hearts that are filled with anger, jealousy, resentment, guilt, lust and a host of other negative emotions. And they’ve taken their toll on us. We no longer feel the joy of our salvation. All we feel instead is a deep emptiness within. Perhaps we’ve committed no grievous sin, but the damage of negative thoughts and negative words and actions to our relationships, particularly our relationship with God is real just the same. We feel no peace within. We know we need to forgive, we know we need to let go of our hurt, our sinful longing, our pride, our resentment, or whatever the negative emotion may be, but our heart won’t let us. And we pray with David, “Oh, Lord, give me a new heart.”
There is someone in this congregation who is praying that prayer right now. Is it even possible to get a new heart? Is it even possible to reprogram our emotions? Is it even possible to get rid of all those negative, hurtful feelings that sometimes well up within us and often overwhelm us? Is it possible to get rid of guilt and greed, lust and loathing, fear and unfaithfulness? In other words, is change really possible?
It is not easy to change the heart.
Some people would say it’s impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible, but I say it is very, very difficult. Have you ever tried to do something simple, like lose weight? For some people it is a major ordeal. They are never able to pull it off, so to speak. And, think of it, extra weight is just on the surface of our lives. Now go deep, deep within our souls and try to extract emotions that have been building since the day we were born. Even the best psychiatrists or psychologists have difficulty with that task. There are prescription medicines that can help us with some problems, but they generally treat only the symptoms, not the deep hurt or conflict within. We need to understand that. Our emotions did not develop overnight. They are the product of years of conditioning. And they will not dissipate in a flash.
Whatever need drove David to lust after another man’s wife did not evolve the day he saw her bathing on the roof. It lay dormant waiting to erupt perhaps since early childhood. In verse 5 he declares, “I have been sinful since my mother conceived me . . .” And that’s true. Our emotions, positive or negative, are deeply rooted. They will not surrender willingly.
Soren Kierkegaard was one of the most deeply intellectual men who ever lived. If you could be saved by your thoughts, surely Kierkegaard could have accomplished it. He was one of the towering philosophers of the nineteenth century, and his thoughts powerfully influenced the twentieth century. Yet he is renowned today as the second great “Melancholy Dane” after Hamlet. Darkness permeated his brilliant writing; his formidable insights were framed by his life’s frustrations and sadness. A modern admirer, Virginia Stem Owens, says, “Nowhere within the considerable number of his published pages will you find a single silver lining.”
From the evidence, we conclude that Kierkegaard felt betrayed by his parents. In a posthumously published work, he wrote he was “insanely” brought up. His father, Michael, was a severe and gloomy man. His mother, Anna, was a servant in his father’s household. She was seduced and impregnated by his father. They were forced to marry. Their relationship was never a healthy one. These and other childhood experiences had a devastating effect on Kierkegaard. Though a profound Christian, he seemed paralyzed by his past. He knew the road to freedom, but could never travel it. Kierkegaard presents a gripping lesson for us all.
We can strive for wisdom, patience, and intuition. We can live lives of prayer and communicate earnestly with God. We can become brilliant theologians, ministers, or Bible study leaders. Yet, if we live with unresolved issues in our lives, we will still remain stagnant and continue to lack hope’s true joy in our lives. We will remain emotionally impoverished. (3)
The problem was not with Kierkegaard’s mind but with his heart. Each of us developed needs when we were only infants or small children, and they are still speaking to us today from deep within our unconscious. In some respects they are playing havoc with our lives. Even that greatest of all saints, St. Paul, wrote in Romans 7: “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (21-25) Paul is speaking to this very thing. He’s saying he cannot control his heart. He cannot control his emotions. He cannot control his sinful nature. Indeed, to a point they control him. If that was true of St. Paul, how much more true is it of you and me?
I have to say to you, I know of no way authentic change takes place in a person’s heart but by the power of God. Medicine can help. Having someone to help you talk out your problems can help.
I encourage you, if you are struggling with some aspect of your life that is dragging you down, please talk to your doctor, talk with me or find a counselor who can help. But there are some problems that simply do not respond to either drugs or psychological counseling. That’s why groups that are successful helping people change such as Alcoholics Anonymous begin by acknowledging a Higher Power.
I personally know of no other way to gain a new heart than by the intervention of a Higher Power. God can help you have a new heart.
You and I need to cry out for a new heart. We have our sins, we have our hurts, we have our fears, we have our regrets. We know what St. Paul meant when he wrote, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” In other words, who will give me a new heart? Then St. Paul answered his own question, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Have you come this day seeking a new heart? Like David you’ve come to the right place. Perhaps it will help if you pray with me.
Let us pray:
“Create in me a new heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me . . .”
