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Hello my “Walking with Jesus” friends,
I hope you are well today and here’s a question I enjoy asking people. . .”How is your heart today?”
The truth is, there has been enough bad news in 2020 to cause us all to have ‘heartburn’, or ‘troubled hearts’, or ‘frightened heart’, or ‘overwhelmed hearts’, or maybe even ‘broken hearts’. But I’d like to ask how your heart is apart from what’s going on in the world. When you consider your own life, your relationships, your career, your family, your spiritual life, your choices…now, how’s your heart? King Solomon wrote: “Above all else, guard your heart, it is the wellspring of your life.” (Prov. 4:23)
This week we’re considering the power of FREEDOM and today I’d like us to think about the FREEDOM of the healed, forgiven HEART, and how it can happen for you and me! King David wrote “Create in me a PURE heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me…Restore to me the joy of Your salvation…” (Ps. 51:10-12) You will remember David wrote that at the lowest point of his life. His heart was overwhelmed by the guilt and shame of his sin of adultery with Mrs. Uriah, and his order that her husband, one of his faithful soldiers, be abandoned on the battlefield and left to die. (2 Samuel 11,12) Guilt and Shame are very powerful emotions aren’t they, and they can tear our hearts apart. But God is powerful enough to heal wounded hearts and mend broken hearts, no matter the cause of our grief. Have you ever experienced God’s powerful healing of your heart?
Listen to Psalm 147:1-3: “How good it is to sing praises to our God…The LORD builds up Jerusalem; He gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
Or how about this from Psalm 40:1-3: “I waited patiently for the LORD; He turned to me and He heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”
OR here’s another one that will greatly encourage you, from Psalm 116:1-7: “I love the LORD, for He heard my voice; He heard my cry for mercy. Because He turned his ear to me, I will call on Him as long as I live. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came upon me; I was overcome by trouble and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the LORD, ‘O LORD save me!”
The LORD is gracious and righteous, our God is full of compassion…when I was in great need, He rescued me. Be at rest once more, O my soul, for the LORD has been good to you…”
In all three of those do you hear a thankful heart, that was almost crushed by the burdens of life? But then God responded to the tearful cry of a desperate person and God brought healing, forgiveness and restored hope to the point that they praised God!
Can you remember a time in your life story when this has happened to you? I urge you to take your “Walking with Jesus” journal and write a paragraph about what you remember as you consider God’s healing of your broken heart in the past.
How do you explain this miracle of ‘heart-healing’? How does it work in practicality? I think Psalm 103 helps us understand… “Praise the LORD, O my soul; all my inmost being (my heart) praise His Holy Name. Praise the LORD, O my soul and do not forget His benefits – He forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, He redeems your life from the pit and crows you with love and compassion…
The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will He harbor His anger forever; He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His love for those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear Him…” What do you hear my friends?
David is overwhelmed with God’s love, God’s compassion, God’s healing of the broken hearted, right? We understand that a central tenet of the Christian faith is that when Jesus went to the cross, He was not only rejected by humanity, and by Satan, but God the Father poured out His wrath on Jesus because He was bearing the sins of humanity. Because of that horrible judgment day, God is able to extend forgiveness to sinners who appeal to Jesus’ sacrifice on their behalf. It’s called “propitiation”. Jesus who was sinless, took our place, as He took upon Himself the wrath of God which we deserved for our sin. (1 John 2:2 & 4:9,10 & 2 Corinthians 5:21)
So now, when you or I, or anyone, agrees with God’s assessment that our behavior, our attitudes, our words are unholy, they are sinful evil… that agreement is called Confess. And when we then reject that sin in ourselves and turn away from that behavior and turn to God asking that He remove our guilt, our shame, our sin because Jesus paid the full price for it, that is called Repent. (1 John 1:9) Then God does remove our sin, He does forgive us, He replaces it with His cleansing, and His holiness. So we go from evil to holy, from sin stained to cleansed, all because of Jesus’ full payment for our sin. Do you see that in Psalm 103?
Pay special attention to vs. 12 “…as far as east is from west, so far has HE (God) removed our transgressions from us…” If you have a globe in your home, or can look at one on the internet, do so. Identify where you live on planet earth. Start running your finger north, and eventually you’ll come to the north pole. If you keep going, now you are heading SOUTH, even though you haven’t turned your hand! We can measure the north pole from the south pole. So if Psalm 103:12 had used north & south instead of east & west, that would be viewed as descriptive of a limited work of God. While He removes our sins, He only takes them away so far.
But Psalm 103:12 says ‘as far as east is from west’ and remember at that time everyone thought the world was flat and they only knew of a fairly small part of our planet! Yet the Holy Spirit led David to write “east from west”. Now go back to your globe, and from where you live start your finger journey to the east… and keep going. While you will be going round and round the globe, you will NEVER start going west, until you turn around and head the other way. You cannot measure east from west, they extend infinitely in opposite directions from each other! So what does that mean to you? How far has God removed your confessed sin from you,if He has separated you from it, ‘as far as east is from west’?
Now, when God has removed our sin, and cleansed us from the stain, the guilt & shame of the sin, then He can begin healing the damage of the sin in our lives as His Holy Spirit pours His love into our minds and hearts, and applies God’s truth to the areas of doubt or rebellion in our lives. That’s why you see in all these Psalms that broken hearted people were soon praising God with thanksgiving for their forgiveness, but also for the healing work God was doing in them! This is what God says to us through His prophet Isaiah and the very descriptive and powerful Isaiah 53. Listen to this: “Surely He (Jesus) took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered Him stricken by God, smitten by Him and afflicted. But He (Jesus) was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace (FREEDOM) was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed.” (Is. 53:4,5)
Now friends, we know sometimes those broken hearts happen in response to very unfair things done to us, or broken promises, or horrible things out of our control. But other times our hearts break when WE have disregarded the truths of God, or the warning of the Holy Spirit of God and we said hurtful things we regret, or we made very wrong choices or we have done things we knew were wrong even before we did them, but we did them anyway…and then we were awash in guilt and shame and remorse.
For today, I urge us to take time to really immerse ourselves in these Psalms, which are the very real-life experiences of people just like us. In fact add Psalm 18:1-19 and all of Isaiah 53. Experience the healing work of God in your heart… and tomorrow we’ll continue this looking at another very important aspect of God’s heart healing miracle and the FREEDOM from guilt and shame that He accomplishes in us.
Bible images provided with attribution to www.LumoProject.com.
Click to read today’s chapter: Psalm 18:1-19; Isaiah 53. (At the top you can choose a different translation.)
Have a comment or question about today’s chapter? I’m ready to hear from you, contact me here.
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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