Love: Heartbeat
Today we continue in our series on Faith, Hope, and Love. We have explored faith and hope, today and for the next few weeks, we will move into love. As 1 Corinthians says, ?faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.? We will spend time talking about love and what it means, but today we are going to start with something a little more fundamental. Our heartbeat.
As I have reflected and think about the church and being the people of God, I have begun to wonder about our heartbeat and what makes us tick.?or stop ticking. Our guiding scripture is from Proverbs 4:23 ?Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.? I invite you to pray with over the message titled ?Heartbeat.?
Well, I am not a doctor. And could barely pass biology 101 in college. So there have been many times when I have asked a doctor to explain it to me like I was a 5 year old. As I was thinking about the heart and how the heart works, I found the information on a children?s website called kidshealth.org. Here is our heart lesson for the day: So the heart is a muscle.? It’s located a little to the left of the middle of your chest, and it’s about the size of your fist. The heart muscle is special because of what it does. The heart sends blood around your body. ?The blood provides your body with the oxygen and nutrients it needs. It also carries away waste. Your heart is sort of like a pump, or two pumps in one. The right side of your heart receives blood from the body and pumps it to the lungs. The left side of the heart does the exact opposite: It receives blood from the lungs and pumps it out to the body.
I can tell you are really excited about our science lesson. But I know someone has a question for me about the heart. How does the heart beat? Well, before each beat, your heart fills with blood. Then its muscle contracts to squirt the blood along. When the heart contracts, it squeezes. Your heart does this all day and all night, all the time. Each beat, each pulse, is caused by the contraction of your heart
And when the pulse cannot be found, the heartbeat is not felt or heard, the heart is no longer beating or pumping, the person is dead. Proverbs says, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”
The thought of the heart and the heartbeat leads me to the church. Is the church still pulsing, pumping, and felt? If you put two fingers on ?the church,? would you find a pulse? Another way to say this, is there something at the core of the church that keeps us beating and going? Or have we lost that way? Losing our ability to beat and pump and live? Or are we keeping our heart with all vigilance and not letting it pump into our world?
I believe, the church-in many cases- has lost its heartbeat; we have lost our focus, our direction, our vision-we have held on so tight, guarded our hearts so much, and we have become caught up in things/divisive issues/ideas/ programs-that have taken our heartbeat away. As we have become caught up in other things, we have lost sight of what our focus should be?being the gospel in the world. Instead we are caught up in looking inside, focusing on ourselves, and forgetting about who our heart is to beat for.
In other cases, the church has gotten caught up in trying to be all things to all people; or nothing to anyone. Just like every person has a distinct heartbeat, every congregation has a distinct heartbeat.
Sometimes as a church, we forget that and do things attempting to ?be the gospel.?
Sometimes we think we need to be the gospel the same way as another church.
Sometimes we think we need to have young people/families/children to be the church.
Sometimes we think we can only be the gospel if we do what we have always done.
Sometimes we forget to be the gospel and we sometimes only read the gospel.
Sometimes we push forward with what we want, instead of listening and following what God wants.
Sometimes we forget who we are at our core, about what and who makes us tick, and have lost our distinct heartbeat.
When I was in West Virginia, we discovered the heartbeat of our church somewhat accidentally. We made the decision to go “all in” to reach out into our neighborhood and meet the needs of the children who lived up and down the street from the church. The five active members of the church, 3 ladies in their 80s and a couple in their 60s, started reaching out into the neighborhood. Block parties, Halloween parties, Christmas parties, etc?and this led to children needing to be fed over the weekend and coming to church on Sunday morning asking for food. Which led to a children?s Sunday school class, parents trickling into the doors of the church. You might think their heartbeat was feeding people, but it was loving people. When the children walked in the door, they were dirty, shoeless, smelly, hungry, sad, happy, hyper, loving?and the congregation loved those children as they were. When their parents started coming in, they loved their parents-who were addicted to drugs, alcohol, abusive, neglectful, unchurched, not married but living together, unemployed-and loved them for who they were?but more importantly they loved them enough to not leave them in those places-and to walk with them along their faith journey. The men?s group started to mentor those dads and helped get them clean; and the women of the church started teaching the mom?s how to parent?After doing this for a period of time, one person from the neighborhood said, ?I can?t even pronounce the name of this church, presby-something?but I have never felt so loved and not judged by a church as I do in this church. You love me for me, and my family, and this community. Thank you for loving us.? We let go of the guard over our hearts, and let it flow in a way that that brought new life.
I wonder, when people look at our church-when they are looking at us, do folks think that we as a church have a heartbeat? Do people see who we are at our core? Do people see that we have a heartbeat for God?s people or do they think we are to guarded, keeping our heart all to ourselves, barely even giving it to God? When people walk into our buildings, meet us on the street, see us in meetings, would they know what makes us tick as the people of God? Or are they wondering if the church knows their heartbeat and if there is a heartbeat for being the gospel anymore?
On the kids health website, it gave a prescription for how to have a healthy heart. So I wanted to take some liberties with that for the church. Here we go:
Most churches are born with a healthy heart and it’s important to keep yours in good shape. Here are some things that you can do to help keep your heart happy:
Remember that your heart is a muscle. If you want it to be strong, you need to exercise it. How do you do it? By being active in a way that gets you huffing and puffing, like reading the Bible, praying, studying the Bible together, laughing in community, serving together in the community. Try to be active every day for at least 30 minutes! An hour would be even better for your heart! Stop making excuses for not doing it too. And start listening for God.
Engage in a variety of healthy ministries, looking outside of yourselves, outside of your own walls, and into your neighborhood; and avoid ministries that are high in being hypocritical, too focused on getting converts, anti homosexual, sheltered (meaning old-fashioned, boring, and out of touch with reality), too political, and judgmental.[1] Those items are from the book ?UnChristian? by David Kinnaman and discussed by Charles Gutenson in ?Church Worth Getting Up For.? These items can be viewed as unhealthy as saturated fats and trans fats by those inside and outside the church.
Know who you are to your core. Determine your vision, mission, and the heartbeat that is unique to who God is calling your congregation to be. Not trying to be the congregation down they street.
Avoid saying things like ?we have always done it this way? or ?when we were bigger, we had this ministry? or ?I remember when we?? and begin dreaming about the future, moving and acting towards the future, instead of focusing on the past.
Don’t let the churches heart stop pumping. It can damage the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Finding out what a congregations heartbeat is extremely important for the future of the church. Everything our church does should flow from what its heartbeat. And it is something that will take time. Just like after a heart attack, it takes time to heal, get strength back, and do things healthier?the church, You, the people of God, need to recover and prepare for the future knowing what it is that makes you beat and pulse so that from our hearts flow the springs of life for the kingdom of God.
So I ask you, can you name the heartbeat of our church in a word or phrase? If you can, I would love for you to write that down on a piece of paper and place it in the offering. If not, we might have lost the thing that makes us beat as a church, and it truly is time to figure out what it is and how we will continue to beat for God?s purposes. For friends, “may these words of my mouth and this meditation on my heart be pleasing your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer (Psalm 19:24).” Amen