Healthy Heart

We have a heart problem.

That means we do no heed the heart of the matter and hurt ourselves and others as a result.

We have no problem with details sometimes; it is the reason for the details that causes us to balk.

We can abide by the letter, but we use the letter to carefully avoid the principle and implications of the law.

We somehow think that God should be impressed with our religiously observant our words and rituals are as we stomp people into the ground and harshly judge their lives while doing whatever we please outside the walls of our carefully constructed "isms."

What kind of Healthy heart does real faith aim us toward?

Let's focus on the word, "HEALTH."

H – Healthy relationships with God and people. The healthy heart produces healthy life in all its dimensions.

E – Engagement with the meaning of our rituals – a willingness to look deeper than the words and symbols to the essence of what God is saying to us through them.

A – Attitudes of grace, and gratitude, free from the strident bondage of a faith based on rules and rigid judgmentalism.

L – Living what we profess so that God is honored and people are lifted, granted justice, offered compassion, and set free to live abundantly.

T – Testing the results of our beliefs in the crucible of how they effect our behaviors and the well-being of people.

H – Humility that causes us to examine our own lives before pointing the finger at other people.

Now, hear the Word of the LORD:

Matthew 15:1-20 The Message (MSG):

After that, Pharisees and religion scholars came to Jesus all the way from Jerusalem, criticizing, “Why do your disciples play fast and loose with the rules?”
But Jesus put it right back on them. “Why do you use your rules to play fast and loose with God’s commands? God clearly says, ‘Respect your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone denouncing father or mother should be killed.’ But you weasel around that by saying, ‘Whoever wants to, can say to father and mother, What I owed to you I’ve given to God.’ That can hardly be called respecting a parent. You cancel God’s command by your rules.

Frauds! Isaiah’s prophecy of you hit the bull’s-eye:

"These people make a big show of saying the right thing,
but their heart isn’t in it.
They act like they’re worshiping me,
but they don’t mean it.
They just use me as a cover
for teaching whatever suits their fancy.”

He then called the crowd together and said, “Listen, and take this to heart. It’s not what you swallow that pollutes your life, but what you vomit up.”
Later his disciples came and told him, “Did you know how upset the Pharisees were when they heard what you said?”

Jesus shrugged it off. “Every tree that wasn’t planted by my Father in heaven will be pulled up by its roots. Forget them. They are blind men leading blind men. When a blind man leads a blind man, they both end up in the ditch.”

Peter said, “I don’t get it. Put it in plain language.”

Jesus replied, “You, too? Are you being willfully stupid? Don’t you know that anything that is swallowed works its way through the intestines and is finally defecated? But what comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing. That’s what pollutes. Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands—that’s neither here nor there.”

The Message (MSG)
Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson