The Whole Body, Part 7: The Heart

Well, this morning, we continue on in the series that we've begun, the idea being the body parts that make up a whole body, that is a sound or a healthy body, a body that's complete, a body that's mature, a body that's not only perfect in that sense of completion or maturity, but perfectly equipped for every good work.

We've worked our way down after the introduction from the head to the eyes and the ears, the nose and the mouth.

And this morning, we come to the heart. Now, recently we've had opportunity to discuss the heart and I was careful to look through the most recent sermons that have touched on the heart, on aspects of the heart, and I was even in November in Matthew chapter 7, we talked about the difference between saying and doing being the heart, keeping the heart, knowing that from the heart flows every issue of life.

We talked about the importance of the heart. Some of you even bought and have been reading

John Flavel, Keeping the Heart, as a result of that. So I had no desire to retrace steps we've already trod so recently and then

I felt not only the freedom, but the importance of focusing on something very peculiar, very particular.

And so there's so much we could say about the heart, there's so much that has been said about the heart and what I'd like to accomplish this morning is to consider one aspect of the kind of heart we need to have as a church body, the kind of heart we need to have as fellow believers in this church body.

We want to talk about two directions, where that comes from and what that leads toward and we'll do those two directions in three parts.

But by way of summary and reminder, let's just define heart at the outset. What is the heart according to Scripture?

Well, it's not simply the muscle that circulates blood through our bodies. The biblical idea of the heart includes the mind, the conscience, the affections, the will.

Listen to John Owen as he defines heart for us. The heart in Scripture is variously used, sometimes for the mind or the understanding, sometimes for the will, sometimes for the affections, sometimes for the conscience, sometimes for the whole soul.

Generally, it speaks of the soul of man and all the faculties of the soul of man, not absolutely, but as they are all one principle of moral operation.

In other words, the soul and all that belongs to it as it's worked out morally or in moral operation.

So listen again to these different things as he says, as they all concur in our doing of good or evil.

The mind, as it inquires, as it discerns, as it judges.

The will, as it chooses or refuses or avoids. The affections, as they like, as they strongly dislike, as they cleave to or as they repel from.

The conscience, as it warms, as it determines. All this together speaks of the heart.

You see, so it's not simply the faculties, but the faculties in operation. The mind, as it weighs and discerns and judges.

The will, as it moves, as it strives. The affections, as they cleave, as they repel.

The conscience, as it becomes sharpened, sensitive, as it becomes dull. This is what we mean biblically by the heart, the faculties of the soul at work in our lives, in our walk.

And so the heart is not merely the seat of our thinking or the government of our decision -making, our affections, our desires.

It's actually what those thoughts, those actions, those judgments and desires look like in practice.

That biblically speaking is the heart. We still speak of the heart in this way. We speak of the centrality of the heart.

We speak of the heart as the core or the points or the revelation.

We get to the heart of the matter, or it may seem that way, but I really know their heart in this, or you might misunderstand.

My whole heart has only been this. We speak in this way. It's not merely the faculty, but the operation of that faculty.

Now Ephesians 4, 17 and following, we looked at last week, and I didn't want to leave that this morning because the very thing

I want to focus on happens to be there toward the very end. Let me just pick up from verse 29 where we left off in Ephesians 4.

We spoke about the mouth last week. Jesus says in Matthew 12, very importantly, that out of the mouth the heart speaks.

So by our words, we understand something about our hearts. By our language, by our speech, if not by our thoughts, we know something about where our hearts are.

I think we can hold this together meaningfully in Ephesians 4. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, so that it will impart grace to the hearers.

And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

So let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, evil speaking be put away from you with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God in Christ forgave you.

So you can see what I'm going for here in Ephesians 4, this beautiful little word, tenderhearted.

Sometimes translated in scripture as affection or affectionate, sometimes translated as compassion or compassionate.

It's used here, it's identical in 1 Peter 3, and the idea is a tender heart, something soft, sensitive, sensible, something that will bend, something that is yielding.

That's the idea of a tender heart, a tender conscience, a tender mind, a tender will.

And this is what I'd like to focus on this morning. And we'll do that in, again, two different directions, where this comes from and what it leads to, but in three areas.

First toward God, secondly toward one another, and then thirdly toward the world. A tender heart toward God, a tender heart toward one another, and a tender heart toward the world.

So that's how I think we can meaningfully think about the heart as a whole body, as a church of Jesus Christ.

So let's begin with where a tender heart even arrives from. It arrives from a relationship with the

Lord. A tender heart toward God is a tender heart from God. That's the first point.

The need for a new heart is spelled out throughout Scripture. You think of it in this way.

It's helpful for us not to simply use the word heart, but to remember all the faculties that that can describe, our conscience, our will, our affections.

So when you're speaking of a stony heart, it might be helpful for you to also speak of a stony conscience, or a will of stone, or affections that are stone.

To think and to speak in this way is usually a little more insightful. Heart can be so generic that it almost doesn't hit us, but when you start to speak of a stone conscience or a stone will or stony affections, now we're getting closer to the dilemma that Scripture holds out.

What do you do with a stony heart? What do you do with stony understanding, so dull it cannot hear, it cannot yield?

What do you do with stony affections? These people, they come, they worship me with their lips. Their hearts are far from me.

That's a stony heart. That's why the prophets cried out for Israel to circumcise their hearts.

That's why the promise of the New Covenant said, I'll take away that heart of stone. I'll put a new heart within you.

I'll cause you to walk in my judgments and statutes. So the predicament of a stony heart is the problem, and that problem is addressed by the

Lord. A tender heart is not something that a worldling can produce.

A tender heart is not something that we can conjure up. A tender heart is not something that follows the consequences of sin being regretted.

A tender heart is something that's actually granted by God as a result of applying the finished work of Christ by His Spirit.

There's a tremendous sermon, I'd highly encourage you to read it, it's perhaps more of a booklet than a sermon, by Richard Sibbes called

The Tender Heart. Let me just pull out a couple gems from this little booklet, this little sermon that Sibbes put together.

And what I want to do is show how Sibbes understands the problem and the answer. And it's really just holding out how

Scripture speaks of the problem of our heart and the answer to that heart. The problem is this, according to Richard Sibbes, a tender heart, so soon as the word is spoken, will yield to it.

That's a glorious truth. Here's the issue. A stony heart will not yield.

A heart of stone will never yield to the word. When his heart was still flesh,

Adam fell into sin. And his heart, in a flash, became granite. And the progeny ever from Adam were born with this condition of a stony heart, of a granite heart.

That is the problem. It cannot yield. It cannot receive. Only those who are spiritual, only those born of the

Spirit are able to yield, are able to receive. This is the problem. A heart that is tender will yield to the word.

It will quake at the threatenings. It will obey precepts. It will melt at the promises. The promises will sweeten the heart that is yielding, that is tender.

But hardness of heart is quite the opposite. For as something dead and insensible, it cannot yield, not to touch, not even to strike.

Listen, he says, such a heart may be broken into pieces, but it will not receive any impression.

You can shatter a stony heart, but you can't get it to yield. You can't get it to melt, to bend.

He says, a stone may be broken indeed, but it will not be pliable. You see, that's the dilemma.

Can you break a stony heart? Can the weight and the pressure of God, of the holiness that His law requires, of the judgment that stands over against man, can that shatter a stony heart?

It certainly can. It certainly can. It could break a stony heart into a thousand pieces, but can it cause any of those pieces to yield, to melt, to bend?

No. A stony heart may be broken, but it will not be pliable.

If you grew up as I did, one of the great blockbusters was Terminator.

You think of, and I'm probably going to lose everyone in this, I'm trying to salvage a good metaphor, but in my mind it's like when

T -1000 breaks into a thousand little pieces, and what good is that?

It's just shattered hard pieces, but the fire in the factory begins to melt, and it all begins to pool together, and then he gets reformed, and I was going to say formed into a new man, made in the likeness, but that doesn't quite fit the storyline of Terminator, but you get the idea.

Something hard, something broken. What good is shattered pieces spread abroad? That you can break a stony heart under conviction doesn't actually mean anything in terms of the grace or redemption of Jesus Christ.

It's those shattered pieces actually becoming soft, actually being flesh, actually yielding, being impressionable.

That's what is needed. And so Sibbes puts it this way, a hard heart is like wax to the devil, but a stone to God.

A hard heart is like wax to the devil, but a stone to God. It will yield somewhere, it will yield to someone or something, it will yield to the father of lies, but not to the father of lights.

It will yield to the murderer from the beginning, but not to the prince of peace. Listen to what

Sibbes says going on, it's a supernatural disposition of a true child of God that he would have a tender, a soft, a melting heart.

Naturally, our hearts are of an entirely different temper, they are stone. There might be tenderness in regard of natural things, in other words, some pagans are kinder than others.

Some dear little old atheist grandmother might still bake cookies for the neighborhood paperboy, but the idea is there's still a stone heart, there's still the condition of Adam's fall at work within her ribcage.

The idea is a stone heart may have natural tendencies toward goodness, observable at the surface, but as John Owen says, a heart is a hornet's nest of evils.

That's the reality. A conscience that has become sensitive will recognize the truth of that.

That's already a sign of tenderness, a sign that there's some recognition, some function that what

God's word says is true of my life, of my condition, of my peril, of my problem.

So there may be tenderness in regard to natural things, but in regard of grace, the heart is a stone.

It beats back anything that's put to it. Think of how rugged a stone is, how much abuse a stone can take, how many strikes and hits can have no impact upon that stone.

And if Sibbes says, say what you will to a hard heart, it will never yield. A hammer will do no good to a stone.

Again, it can break it into pieces, but it can't mold it into a form. So to a stony heart, you can break it into pieces, but you can't work upon it.

It's only the almighty power of God that can cause a stony heart of man to yield.

There's nothing in the world so hard as the heart of man. Adamantium, he says, the very creatures will yield obedience to God like flies and lice to destroy

Pharaoh, but Pharaoh himself was so hard -hearted that even after ten plagues, he was ten times more hardened.

There's nothing as hard as a hard heart. That is the problem. So that means we have to know our hearts.

This is why Proverbs says, listen to me. And part of that listening is understand every issue of your life will flow out of your heart.

You better know your heart. You better pay attention to your conscience, to your affections, to your will.

Every aspect of your life is going to flow out of these things. We remember what the Lord said, that he doesn't look at the physical stature as a man might look.

1 Samuel 16, the Lord does not see as a man sees. The Lord looks at the heart.

If you don't understand a lot about Scripture, that's like something you'd put on a coffee mug. It's like a warm font.

The Lord looks at the heart. If you're a Calvinist, that is a sobering thought. The Lord looks at my heart.

He doesn't see as I like to see. He doesn't see with the flattery I give myself. He doesn't see with the scant

I look out on others. The Lord sees the heart. So that's the problem.

And what's the answer? Well, the answer, of course, is the Gospel. How does the almighty power of God cause a stony heart to become flesh and to yield?

Well, again, he applies that saving work of Christ by his Spirit. The answer begins with Christ.

God gives Christ to the church. That's the first great gift of God. And when

God has given Christ, Sibbes says, then comes the Spirit. And He works in the heart to a gracious acceptance of the mercy of Christ.

So the Spirit now causing that heart of stone to become a heart of flesh. Causing that to yield and to receive and to become aware of this finished work of Jesus Christ for the sake of one's soul.

And then it produces assurance, love, mercy, awe, wonder. Now the heart is pumping.

It's beating. It's sensitive. It's responsive. It's being molded. It's able to yield. And so from the heart now, mercy is felt.

I hope you understand the imagery here. Stony hearts don't receive mercy. They can't feel mercy.

They can't comprehend mercy. To comprehend the mercy of God in Christ is already to have a heart of flesh.

A heart of stone cannot do it. It takes a heart of flesh to begin to produce these kinds of sentiments.

Did the God of heaven and earth, the maker of all that is, not withhold

His own Son but send that Son to die for my sake? Would He humble

Himself upon a tree of agony for my soul? Has He let angels alone and left many thousands in the world to choose me rather than let me starve and be ruined everlastingly?

Has He sent His people as ministers and witnesses to give me the assurance of pardon and of love and of mercy?

You see, it's a heart of flesh that begins to be caught up in the awareness of who

God is and what He's done. It's able to yield. The heart is now not just pliable, it's dissolving, as it were, into the very love of God.

What does Paul say in Romans 5? It's the Spirit of God pouring out that love in our hearts.

It's the love of God, as we understand it from the Gospel, that's now being poured into a heart that's capable to receive it, capable to yield to it.

It's no longer a heart of stone. So the heart begins to contemplate, to be caught up in the wonder of God's love.

The heart is now melting, melting in conviction over sin, in that humility and meekness, also being aghast at the pardoning love of God in Christ.

And listen to what Sid says. So then finally, when our souls have been persuaded that God's love is for us, we begin to reflect our love toward Him, and our hearts begin to say,

Speak, Lord, send me, what will you have me do? I am yours.

That is a new heart. That is a heart from God. So a tender heart toward God is a tender heart from God.

When the heart is worked upon by the Spirit of God, it must become tender. It must begin to yield.

It must become sensible. It must become sensitive. We begin to understand every aspect of our lives in light of this work of God's Spirit.

And our hearts are made sensitive to not only His work in our lives, but His work in the world, His work around us,

His judgments, His word, His beautiful providence at display at every turn of our lives.

Our hearts are made capable of receiving that, of even yielding to the most difficult providences in our lives.

That's a heart of flesh. And this is what

Paul was getting at in Romans 12. We were there some weeks ago. I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you would offer up your souls, offer up your bodies to be a living sacrifice.

You can't do that with a stone heart. You wouldn't want to with a stone heart.

You could care less with a stone heart. You only yield yourself if you have a heart that's been tenderized by the

Spirit of God. Because He has given me a new heart, a heart that can yield, a heart made tender, I want to offer myself up to Him, holy and acceptable in His sight.

I was on Tuesday at a nurse meeting, and Paul Wanamaker, some of you know Paul Wanamaker, he preached a wonderful sermon where he was getting at the issue of compassion, which, again, is a cognate for this word, tenderhearted.

It could be translated that way. Sometimes it is. And he was looking at compassion through the lens of the sons of thunder,

John and James and Luke 12, when they want to call down fire from heaven upon the

Samaritans. And Jesus rebuked them and said, you don't know what spirit you're of. And so Paul was getting at, you know, in our dark days as a society, our dark days in this nation, are we closer to the sons of thunder than the spirit that Christ is looking for?

So much zeal, so much righteous indignation about the rejection and the debauchery of the world around us that we're almost pleading,

Lord, will you send down fire? Can we actually call down fire? And one of the things that Paul noted was, it's interesting that John, one of the sons of thunder, would become, as it were, the theologian of love.

If you read 1 John, you read even his gospel. And of course, in the book of Acts, later accompanying

Peter to go preach the gospel in Samaria, preaching to Samaritans.

He brought up again this image of a heart of stone being made hard flesh in one pass when we consider the thief on the cross.

Of course, there were two thieves on the cross and they were both mocking and scorning

Jesus. What happened to cause the one thief to go from heaping scorn and mockery and derision upon the suffering

Savior to then asking him to be with him in paradise? And Paul, in his sermon, he said, the only thing we could point to is the compassion he saw in Christ who asked his

Father to forgive his tormentors and executioners. In the midst of his worship.

And that was enough to turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh, to make it pliable, to make it yield, to make it earnest, to say, can

I come with you into paradise? To begin to rebuke the thief on the other side. We deserve this, but he doesn't deserve this.

Do you see? And so that is the example that's laid down for us as we sort of bridge to our second point now where to walk in this kind of mercy, compassion, love, where to have this kind of tender heart, even as Christ has had this kind of compassion, mercy, tender heart toward us.

He gave himself to be our example. That's what 1 Peter 3 is getting at. He was tenderhearted, full of compassion.

And so we're to walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us.

So it's this apprehension of God's love in Christ that the Spirit applies and it begins to cause our hearts to yield, our hearts be compliable, impressionable, sensitive.

Again, not just our heart, but what? Our affections, our conscience, our mind, our judgments, our will, our discretion.

Do you see? All that comprises the heart. And that means that this tender heart we've received from the

Lord is now soft to the Lord, yielding to the Lord, but now also soft and yielding toward one another.

That's the second point, tenderhearted toward one another. A tender heart is able to exhibit this kind of fruitfulness, this kind of light and peace toward others.

And that begins in the church. If you can't be tenderhearted here, I don't think you can be tenderhearted anywhere.

The people sitting around you that you are joints and ligaments together with are far more your neighbors than almost anyone else in this world.

There's a prioritization of love toward the body, especially the household of faith is a formula in Scripture that helps us understand this thing.

We're to be neighbors to all, but we can put it this way, we're to understand especially what that means toward each other in this body.

And if we can't do it here, we can't do it there. We can't do it anywhere else. So we're to be tenderhearted toward one another.

Our motivation, again, is toward the Lord because of what we received from the Lord. Our affection for the

Lord becomes our affection for one another. It's based on what we've received. Again, walk in love, that's what we are to be toward one another, as Christ has loved us and given himself for us.

We've received that, therefore we reflect that. We have understood that, therefore we apply that.

The more we know of God's love, the more that love makes us love others. The more our love becomes like the love of Christ.

And what is the love of Christ? The love of Christ is not some mild, tepid thing.

It's a fierce love. It's a fervent love. It's a constant love. It's a never -failing love.

Our failures to love in this way actually just bring us back to his love. And we see more and more of the perfections of it, the constancy of it.

We begin to thank him that his love is not like our love. His faithfulness is not like our faithfulness.

You begin to understand what Paul said we could never fully understand, the width and the depth and the height of the love of Christ.

Christ's love for you is not some mild, distant, politely disinterested, disengaged kind of love.

It's this ferocious, yearning, protective, soul -stirring kind of love.

And that's the kind of heart a church body needs to have. That's the kind of love that covers not just three sins, but a multitude of sins.

That's also the kind of love that's willing to faithfully wound, willing to faithfully bear whatever comes from loving someone in a way they don't want to be loved, being watchful over a soul in a way they don't want to be watched.

This kind of love doesn't erase sin. It just covers it. It buries wrongs.

It doesn't harbor offenses. It doesn't cause a festering, but it rather causes a cleansing, a healing, a freedom, a release.

This is a new commandment that Christ has given His people. Love one another even as I have loved you.

They couldn't fully understand that in John 13. They probably thought they did.

I don't think Peter even understood it in the resurrection narrative. He's still cut to the heart when

Jesus is saying, Peter, feed My sheep. He still hasn't understood the love that He's called to.

This is what it means to belong to Jesus as His disciples. By this all men will know you are

My disciples, that you love one another. So this is going to bridge to our third point, which we're not quite there yet, but I want you to see how closely the heart we have toward one another is held to the heart we have toward the world.

In fact, there's something about the witness we give to the world that exists in the love we show to each other in the body.

There should be something radically other than. Your love for brothers and sisters in the body should not look like your love for coworkers in the workplace.

Your love for brothers and sisters in the body should not look like love for distant and estranged family members or kin.

This is a unique love, a spirit -wrought love, a set -apart love that becomes a witness in all of those areas.

This is a holy society, a royal priesthood. This is something that the world doesn't quite understand or grasp.

That contrast becomes a powerful way of being salt and light. Who loves in this way?

Where does this love come from? We ought to be able to say it comes from God. It exists because of God.

We love Him who first loved us. We love each other because He loved us. And you are willing to stick around, we'll love you too.

Paul in Colossians 3 says it's as the elect of God, holy and beloved in this way, that we put on tender mercies.

We have a tender heart. Kindness, humility, meekness, long -suffering, bearing with one another, forgiving one another.

You see, this is all the conditions that God brings about in the heart. And so Christians, of course, have to work at this.

This doesn't come naturally. Even for those that we are naturally comfortable with as fellow believers, we see it requires hard work.

We see that the flesh wars against the spirit. We see that we truly are against not just the world, but the devil and even our own flesh.

There's all sorts of temptations, snares and pitfalls. Sometimes it's hardest to love fellow

Christians. It's easier to love the co -worker, easier to love the estranged relative.

And Christians have to work at this kind of affection. It's why every apostolic letter has something of this command, something of this call or this rebuke, because it doesn't come naturally.

No church has ever found this to be natural. And of course, as Sinclair Ferguson says, churches find it very easy to deal with false teaching, find it very hard to deal with differences of opinion.

Some of the things at a basic level, just how different we are, makes it very hard for us to love each other as we ought to love each other.

It's easy when we're galvanized against some political prospect or some error, but it's usually not that external threat, that political pressure, that economic devastation that's causing any differences or grievances between us.

What is it? It's usually our personal differences. It can't be, as we've said in times past, that the primary thing that holds our fellowship together, which is the gospel, is secondary things, by which, from the gospel, we have distinctive congregations, distinctive traditions, but it's those third -level areas.

Not quite Adiaphora, because the differences really do matter, but they're not differences that ought to define our gathering or our fellowship.

They're rather just personal, perhaps family differences. And these things will often sow seeds of bitterness.

Or they'll become central issues rather than being seen as third -level issues.

And when a third -level issue becomes a central issue, it sucks all of the energy out of the gathering and all of the momentum out of the fellowship.

And this really is a test of our heart as a body. How do we love one another? How do we love one another?

How we handle our differences will be a bellwether to the condition of our heart as a body.

Am I tenderhearted toward those that are my brothers and sisters that I gather with routinely?

Am I tenderhearted toward them? What does that tenderheartedness look like?

Is that a word, tenderheartedness? What does that look like in practice? Am I kind?

Do I seek to impart grace? Am I willing to yield? Am I longsuffering? Am I forbearing?

Am I an encouragement? Is there any refreshment of love? As Paul says in Philemon, he talks about Epaphroditus being this refreshment of love to him.

I hope we can be a refreshment of love to one another. You slung through difficult weeks or difficult trials, it should be a brother or sister who's that breath of fresh air.

Oh, it's so good to be around someone who understands the Lord, who understands a little bit perhaps of what

I'm going through, and is seeking to impart grace, is seeking to encourage me. Praise the Lord for that. What a refreshment of the love of Christ.

This is what Paul's getting at Ephesians 4. It's the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies according to that effective working by which every part does its share.

And this causes the growth of the body. And what does that growth look like? The edifying, the building up of the body in love.

The heart of that body is the heart of the whole matter. Our eyes, our ears, our mouths, that doesn't mean anything if we don't understand the heart rightly.

The way that I think, the way that I discern, the way that I judge, what my affections are drawn toward, what my conscience is sensitive to.

Do you see? The heart is behind all of those things. That will make or break the body of Christ. John Owen says,

A church full of love is a church well built. I would rather see a church filled with love a thousand times than filled with the best, the highest, the most glorious gifts and parts that any man in this world could be made partakers of.

Do you see what he's saying? He understands Ephesians 4, 11 through 13.

The growth of the whole body, the maturity, the perfection of the whole body is a body edifying itself in love.

And he said, I'd rather see a thousand times a church being edified in love, a church with a yielding, sensitive heart, conscience, mind.

I'd rather see that a thousand times than have a gathering of the best and the brightest and the most gifted, lacking that.

Because that will be an immature church. That will be a herd of cats. A mature church, a whole church, will be a church that has a tender heart from God and therefore a tender heart toward one another.

And this is why Paul can say, therefore let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, evil speaking be put away.

And again, the standard is how God in Christ has forgiven us. We're to forgive one another.

Ephesians 4, Colossians 3, the imagery is replete. That's our standard. That's our measure.

If you think, and perhaps we'll look at the church at Corinth, they wanted to have the best and the brightest, the most gifted.

They were willing to split into factions for the sake of striving for the best gifts. And Paul says, you're seeking the best,

I'll show you the best way. Whatever way you've been seeking, I'll show you a better way. The better way is not in the way you're going.

It's not in the things that you're striving for. It's not to be the best and the brightest or to mold everyone into your own image. It's actually to build up the body and all of these body parts in the love of Christ.

He talks about what that love is not. This is why he can go on, perhaps we'll look at it in a moment, a symbol that's clanging if you lack love.

All of the gifts of revelation, of charisma, of speech, to understand and fathom all mysteries, but to lack love is to be useless, is to be in vain.

So what does that mean for Paul's conception of the body? What does that mean for us to understand what's the most important thing about this body?

How do you present striving in the flesh, seeking out of pride, or being hurt out of pride?

What's the kind of things that ought to unify us together? These are matters of the heart. And so a tender heart from God is a tender heart for the body.

And a tender heart for the body will be ever sensitive. Again, think of conscience, will, affections.

This is what we mean by heart. A tender heart, a tender conscience, tender affections, a tender will will become increasingly sensitive to any hardness, any friction between brethren.

It will be, as Scripture says, a bone out of joint. Have you ever had a bone out of joint?

I remember I was demolishing a friend's attic with him one summer. His dad was paying me, and I was making buck.

During the summer, it was great, because I was like 15 or 16. And I had all this horsehair plaster.

It was an old, it was on the third story in the attic. We actually found some really cool stuff that Wachusett Antiques would probably love to have behind some of the plaster.

And we pulled, and there was this old abandoned brick chimney. And, you know, we wanted to get the job done pretty quickly.

And so we started not just taking brick by brick, but stacks of brick and throwing them out the window into a dumpster.

And my friend got a little overeager, and he went to go take a rather massive stack. And all of a sudden, he sort of froze and started yelling.

And I instantly dropped all my bricks. And he's like, ah, I dislocated my shoulder. And he's screaming. I'm like, ah,

I don't know what to do. He's like, just hold on to my arm. Hold on to my arm. So we're both just wild eyed. I'm holding on to his arm.

And he just sort of throws himself into me. And he puts his own shoulder back into place. And he's like, ah, ah,

I'm good. And I was like, what in the world was that? That was like a Chuck Norris move.

I was amazed. And that memory has stuck with me when

I think about a bone out of joint. That was not something he could take in stride. Oh, you know what?

My shoulder is dislocated right now. Well, that really throws a wrench in the old works.

Well, I'll try to do what I can. Do you see the imagery here? Everything ceases.

A bone is out of joint. Nothing else matters in the world but getting that bone back to the socket, back to where it needs to be.

A heart that is tender, a sensitive conscience, affections that are willing to yield, they're not going to be able to tolerate a bone out of joint.

Part of having that conscience, part of having that understanding of a tender heart means I can't afford to have a bone out of joint.

I know what this means for my soul long term. I know what this means for my walk with the

Lord. I understand these things. There was an interesting story of a, this is going back to the very beginning of the 18th century, in the world of pirates and privateers, and there was one young man named

Alexander Selkirk. And in 1704 he became a privateer, and he joined this crew, and he was at odds with the captain of their ship as they did raids on Spanish merchant ships and so on to try to fund their own adventures as well as giving some courtesy to the

English empire. And this man, Alexander, began to take great issue with the leadership of Captain William.

Captain William was making blunder after blunder, and the whole crew was beginning to murmur and grumble, and Alexander, being a very self -sufficient man, a very independently -minded man, was finding it really hard to tolerate

Captain William. If you could put it this way, he became very bitter toward Captain William. Well, they ended up taking over another ship, and another leader emerged from the fray, and that leader,

I think his name was Thomas, said, whoever wants to come with me will commandeer this ship, and William and the rest of the crew can stay on theirs.

And Alexander said, good riddance. I don't ever want to see Captain William again. So he got on this other ship, and guess what the captain of this other ship did?

He didn't really like Alexander, and so they got into a squabble, and Alexander thought, well,

I'm going to show my leverage because he really needs me. He got on a rowboat with a chest of a few provisions, and he sailed out to one of the most remote islands in the

Pacific Ocean, Mas de Tierra. It's a speck in the middle, and nothing around it for 100 miles.

And he sat there on that deserted island, only a few miles across, and thought, any day now,

Thomas is going to come. He knows how much he needs me. And then he saw that boat sail into the sunset.

Any day now, he'll be coming back. And then for four years, he was on that island.

Thankfully, there were feral pigs. He built a little shack. He didn't speak to anyone for four years.

Spaniards came at one point, and he thought it was his crew coming to rescue him.

He then had to run for his life, and they sort of destroyed a lot of his belongings, and he was really in a desperate way.

And so he started to kind of lose some of his mind, but he was surviving, and he just looked like a wild man. He hadn't spoken to another human being for four years.

Well, the day finally comes where this English merchant ship comes, and they're looking to garner some supplies, and he runs.

He almost forgot how to speak. He was so overwhelmed with joy, the sense of, I'm finally free. I can finally go home.

He's weeping. He's joyous. He's exuberant. He's trying to motion them to come into the hut because he's going to prepare a pig for them.

He's so excited. And they're just as amazed. How did this man survive? And it's just incredible.

He gets on the rowboat, gets back to the ship, and who's on the ship but Captain William, the man that he was bitter to four years earlier.

The amazing thing is, despite all the peril and desperation, as soon as he saw

William, he wanted to go back to the island. And the captain of the ship had to say, are you serious?

And actually had to convince him, for the better part of an hour, you need to bury the hatchet with William and get on the ship because there might not be another ship for you.

That is the power of a grudge. It doesn't matter how desperate you are.

That grudge has far more power than your desperation. That's a force.

That's a current. That is an energy that describes a stony heart.

And as we saw from Sibbes at the beginning, what can break a stony heart? What can break a stony heart?

There's no force in the world that can break a stony heart. So we give grace to others to the degree that our hearts are tender, are pliable, because of the grace that we've received.

As we recognize that, we'll do all that we can to guard it, to make sure that our flesh and the world and the evil one don't ebb that away or ensnare us against it.

The relationship we have with God then is the very heart of our heart. It's our tenderness.

It's our conscience. It's keeping the heart that keeps our heart not only toward God or for ourselves, but with our fellow brethren.

And this means that the relationship we have with God is affected by the relationship we have with one another, even as the relationship we have with one another is affected by the relationship we have with God.

The true believer is able to love other believers not because of what they are to him or to her, but because of who they are in Christ.

That is the foundation of all Christian love. And if you can understand that in a body, you can understand that in the world.

I can love you because of who you are to God. You're a human being made in his image, made for his glory.

But in rebellion and sin, you've disfigured that image, and you seek to be cast away from that image, and you pervert and distort that image and put in its place all manner of idols and evils.

It's because of who you are to God that I can actually love you.

I can actually strive with you. I can actually suffer for you. If I'm not able to frame it in that vertical relationship,

I'll never be able to love as I'm called to love. In other words, I'll never have the tender heart I'm called to have. If it doesn't happen in the church, again, it won't happen in the world.

If we can't love one another with a fervent love, with an above -all love, we're not going to be able to love others. You can't love the people that love

God. How are you going to love the people that hate God? It's just not possible. That means you've completely misunderstood what this vertical dimension of God's love means.

So the church is the arena. It's the proving grounds. It's the garden nursery. It's the boot camp for practical

Christian living. And if we get that, and we get the momentum of that, then it carries us into the world.

That kind of love can't be contained. That kind of heat, that kind of warmth, that kind of light and zeal, it must break forth.

It must go out from its midst. And that's the idea. If Israel didn't have their hearts far from God, they would have been a light to the

Gentiles. They would have had the nation streaming into Zion. And so it's our heart, our love for one another, that begins to shape and mold and even influence and direct our love for the world around us.

You think of Matthew chapter 9, another beautiful image of this idea of tenderheartedness, the same very powerful

Greek word within that phrase, tenderhearted, splachna. It speaks of the heart, the affections, the guts, the bowels, that which is the most inward.

In Matthew 9, Jesus is looking at the crowds that are following Him, and we say, we read that He felt compassion for them.

He felt tenderhearted toward them. Why? He saw them as sheep without a shepherd. That's Matthew 9.

He sees multitudes, and His heart melts toward them.

He's tenderhearted toward them. They're so lost. They're so lost.

They have no idea where they are or where they're going. There's no one to protect them, no one to lead them.

They're vulnerable to all manner of enemy, poacher, wolf. He had compassion because of their ruin, because of their condition.

Matthew 9 takes us to Matthew 23. He again is over the multitude. In this case now, it's the multitude of the city.

And He weeps over the city. He weeps over the city.

That's tenderheartedness. Oh, Jerusalem. Jerusalem, you stoned every prophet

I ever sent to you. How I longed to gather you into my bosom like a mother hen.

But you weren't willing. And it's through tears that He says, see, your house is left to you desolate.

It's so easy to have that kind of mentality. Just cut out that little prophetic condemnation, that oracle of woe.

Abstract it from its context. And what do you see there? It's what we want to see there. Your house is left desolate.

You'll now be a devastating ruin. We read the prophets in this way.

We think of Jesus Christ in this way. As if there was no tenderheartedness even in that prophetic oracle of woe, of destruction.

We don't see the tear stains from Jeremiah's cheeks when he's going about giving these oracles of destruction.

He was a weeping prophet for a reason. Jesus, we cannot read

His oracles of destruction apart from the tender heart that He had. In other words, we can't pray the imprecatory

Psalms or call down fire from heaven if we haven't cried those tears, if we haven't prayed those prayers.

We don't know what spirit we're of. And it tends to be that the most zealous for God's judgment to come to the world around them tend to be piranha -like in the church of Christ.

They want to devour with fire those outside as enemies of Christ. No wonder they devour those inside as well.

You see, we haven't understood the first thing about the heart as a body if we haven't understood the heart of Christ.

And if you don't love one another in the way that God has loved you in Christ, how could you possibly love those who hate

Christ and rebel against Him? The very ones that He felt compassion and tenderheartedness toward when

He saw they were like sheep without a shepherd. They were lost. The very ones that as they crucified

Him and pressed the thorns and nails into His body, He said, Father, forgive them. Don't you pray for more

Stevens in the church? He understood the mission. Though they're hurling stones at me and I'm losing consciousness as I'm losing blood,

I see my Savior and I'm reminded, Father, forgive them. Save them.

Save some of them. What is that but a tender heart? You, of course, understand that this can never be at the expense of truth.

Jesus was very honest and truthful about sin and judgment as Christians must be. It's not loving to hang rainbow banners and form kumbaya circles and have these empty hollow phrases like love wins.

That's not the kind of Christian love that actually comes from a tender heart. A tender heart recognizes the reality of God's judgment, the reality of sin, the problem of a stony heart that no hammer, no sermon can break.

It's entirely up to the Spirit of God to melt that heart into a heart of flesh. And therefore, the tender heart is a heart that is humble, it's meek, it's hungry, it's thirsty, it's yearning.

It feels overwhelmed at the stakes, at the helplessness of it all, but hopeful because of who

God is and the power that He wields. It's a tear -stained heart, even as it's a strident, strong heart.

We're not just looking at the heart and in a couple of weeks we'll be talking about the spine. I want to have a better spine as a church, but not at the expense of the heart, not at the expense of a tender heart.

This is what Paul is getting at with the Corinthians. The clamor, the strife, the malice, the evil speaking, the showmanship, the one -upmanship, the chips on the shoulder, and he says,

I came to you and preached nothing but Christ and Him crucified. Do you remember who that is? Do you remember what he did? Clearly not, because you couldn't act in this way.

You couldn't conduct yourselves in this way if you were remembering and looking to Him. So I determined to know nothing among you but that, not the theology of glory or theology in the abstract, but a theology of the crucified one.

That's the better way. You speak with tongues of men, tongues of angels even. If you don't have love, you're just clinging brass.

You could understand all prophecy, all mystery, all knowledge, have all faith, throw mountains to the left and right.

Some of you love hiking, the presidentials or going overseas and hiking perhaps in Italy.

Throw those mountains aside. Have the kind of faith that you could say, cast yourself into the sea. Have that kind of faith and not love, and you're nothing.

Give everything you have to feed the poor. And don't just stop there. Don't just give everything you have.

Give your own body to be burned. Be a martyr. And if you don't have love, that didn't mean anything.

Do you see what Paul's getting at? Is it really a tender heart or is it something other, some other motivation, some other drive, some other way of being perceived or holding influence or counting one against another?

That's not love. That's not a tender heart. That's not the mind of Christ. 1

Timothy 1 .5, Paul says this, the goal of this command, in other words, the goal of the things that I'm calling you to, the doctrine, the sound doctrine, that's to pattern your life, the teaching that is trustworthy and true, the goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, a sincere faith.

You see how he holds all that together? The heart, the conscience, sincerity, goodness, faith.

This is what it means for a body to have this kind of heart. Every now and then you come against a believer that has a head full of knowledge and a heart empty of love.

And in the Reformed circles, in the Reformed world, that gets pretty far with us. That's a passport that will travel.

We like heads full of knowledge. We don't make much out of a heart lacking love. That's not how

Paul approached Corinth. That's not how he viewed the maturity of the Corinthian church. So what is a whole body?

What is a whole church? What is a sound, healthy, maturing church? Without the heart, Paul says, it's nothing.

It's useless. It's a void. Why does it take up the ground? There's no fruit that's emanating from it.

That's the idea. That's the importance of a tender heart. We don't need warriors, uncritical in their discernment, judgmental of all around them, if they lack this kind of compassion and tenderness that's wrought by the very

Spirit of God in someone's life. Love is the end of all doctrine. Love is the end of the whole law, to love

God rightly and to love one's neighbor as oneself. Do you understand? Love is the center of it all.

And so, where's our heart? Christian living should be something emotional but also something discerning.

We ought to have warmth affections without warm affections causing us to go astray or to be captive to every wind of doctrine.

There needs to be a spine of discernment, a solidity of strength, but also a warmth within that, a heart of flesh, a compassion, a desire for the other.

Christian living ought to be emotional in this way. A heart, a tender heart, is an emotional thing. But it's not captive to emotionality.

It's not subject to emotions. It's rather emotions that come from being subject to Christ, subject to His Word.

So it's not raw emotionalism, but it is emotional. Jesus felt something in His body when

He saw the crowd. When the rich young ruler came up with all His pomposity, we read

Jesus loved Him. He had a tender heart toward Him, even if He sent Him away sorrowful.

Do you see? It's the emotion that needs to correspond to that tender heart because the tender heart has been given to us in the

Gospel. As Jeff Thomas, one of my favorite preachers, put it, we need affection in response to theology.

Don't pit those two things against one another and get the order right. Affection in response to theology.

You will know how tender your heart is if your affections liven up and warm up in response to doctrine, in response to the

Gospel. And if you feel no warming, no plying, no yielding, you ought to question how tender -hearted you really are.

Listen to Richard Sibbes as we come toward a close. A man may know his heart to be tender and sensible in regard to others.

Just a pause there. Do you want to know if you have a tender heart? Don't go in your corner alone and say, do

I have a tender heart? Yes, I must have a tender heart. You want to know if you have a tender heart? You'll know by how you think of and relate to others.

If they're wicked, the one with a tender heart will have a tender heart for them like David in Psalm 119, my eyes pour out continual rivers because of them that don't keep your law.

Again, easy to read the imprecatory prayers, some of which David penned as oracles of judgment, unflinching, made of steel.

And you miss lines like this. My eyes pour out rivers because of lawbreakers around me.

They're lost. They're lost. Paul said, there are so many that walk in insubordination of whom

I've told you before, and I tell you now. What do you think the tone was behind that?

Indignation, fierce anger, calling down fire from heaven? No. There are many that walk in insubordination of whom

I've warned you before, and now I even tell you, weeping. When Paul knew that wolves would come in and not spare the flock, he sat there with some of those men in Acts 20, the elders of Ephesus, and he wept with them.

But it's not only that. The tender heart, of course, is not just tender in compassion, but it's, as we said, it's tender in response to theology, in response to what

God has made known. And that means it's also tender to two imprecatory prayers.

It's tender to the reality of God's judgment. It yeses and amends the righteous judgment of God. All I'm saying is you dare not have one without the other.

As Sibbes goes on to say, when Christ looked to God's decree, he says, Father, I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth.

You have hid these things from the wise and the noble, and you've only revealed them to little children. So notice the tender -hearted

Jesus toward those that are in darkness, that are lost, is also tender -hearted toward the Lord's sovereign will to reveal himself to some and not to others.

And he says, I thank you, I rejoice in you. Amen, Father. That means that our hearts are tender to whatever

God does, because whatever God does is right. A tender heart yields to the rightness of God's judgment.

A tender heart yields to the rightness of God's providence. I would not put a thorn into my side, but my heart yields.

My heart is tender to the God who in wisdom has put a thorn in my side. That's a tender heart.

Whatever the Lord does, that tender heart will yield to it. Whatever the Lord puts before that tender heart, that tender heart will do.

The Lord puts a cause to mourn, the tender heart will mourn. If the Lord gives a reason to rejoice, the tender heart will rejoice.

You see, the tender heart is equipped for every good work. Why? Because it's not stone.

It's pliable, it's soft, it's willing to yield, it's sensitive, it's full of affections, it has a will directed by God's Word.

All I'm saying is we dare not go in the direction of imprecation, of righteous judgment, if we haven't first wept over the city like Jesus.

Let me boil it down even more and just put it in a phrase for you. No imprecation without intercession.

Don't amen the fire that falls from heaven until you've wept for the souls that the fire falls upon.

If you're able to do that, God help us, if we're able to do that, we will be a tender -hearted body.

We will be a body that has understood the gospel of Jesus Christ, understood the forgiveness that we have so freely received, the mercy that we did not deserve, and from that mercy desire for others to receive the same, to mourn when they reject it, to feel tenderness and compassion when they're just lost in their abject darkness.

Well, as we close, brothers and sisters, what does this look like practically for us? How can we have this kind of heart as a body?

Well, I wanted to open the service with Psalm 139 for this reason. Psalm 139, at the very end of that psalm, this marvelous psalm that both begins and ends with the wonderful knowledge of God's wonderful knowledge of us.

You formed me. You knit me together. You appointed my days before I had any days, before there were any days.

You know me. You know the path that I tread. And that knowledge, that recognition, leads at the end of Psalm 139, this heartful cry, search me and know me, show me any wicked way within me.

What the psalmist is doing is he's asking the Lord, reveal my heart.

Reveal something within me. Search me. Try me. Know me. There's been a lot of discussion lately among religious sociologists, statisticians and whatnot, cultural hawks, about why non -Protestant forms of Christianity are gaining traction among this emergent generation.

There's all manner of reasons, and probably half those reasons have some truth in them. Why are a lot of the younger generation peeling toward Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism?

Well, a lot of that has to do with a desire for being rooted in something that is not effervescent in passing, like almost everything that's part of our society today and our technology today.

There's nothing rooted. There's nothing stable. So the idea is I can actually be caught up like a cog in some grand wheel that stretches back thousands of years.

Now, Protestants have very good answers for that that usually don't matter, because at that level it's like, I see the individualism, the subjectivism, the big church and the projector screen, and every song's about me, myself,

I, and there's something so focused on me, and I don't like that. I don't like that subjectivity, that individualism.

I want something that's far more objective, concrete, abstract, outside of me, a tradition that's so mysterious,

I don't understand what my left or right hand are doing, but somehow I feel like I can belong and make it my own. There's a lot of power and pull in that.

Smoke and mirrors have always had that kind of power and pull. The sense of the grand mantle has always had that kind of allure.

And in part, I'm sympathetic to that. I, too, do not like that rugged individualism, the me, myself, and I focus when we ought to be focused on God and on the faith once we're all delivered.

But the reason I opened Psalm 139 is for this very reason. We better understand that our religion is an experiential, intimately personal religion.

It's not so mysterious, so abstract and concrete, so just show up and not even understand what's going on, that the psalmist can't say, search me, know me, expose things within me, do this work in my life.

You see, there's something that's incredibly intimate about the me, my, I, and we dare not lose that.

There's been recent pushes in Reformed circles against what could be called Reformed spirituality or, in better days, was called

Reformed piety. Let's dispense with that. No, let's not.

Let's actually honor our fathers and mothers in the faith and go in that narrow, difficult way that they did as they strived to be holy.

And that begins with, search me, know me, show me a wicked way within me.

Lord, it's my life before You, my heart that I keep to You, and if I don't keep this heart, no tradition and no one else is going to keep it for me.

If I don't keep my heart to You, every issue that flows out of my life will lead to ruin.

So search me and know me. Keep my heart before You. Keep my heart yielding. Keep it sensitive.

Keep it fleshly. Don't let it calcify or become hardened, indifferent, implacable, immovable.

Search me and know me. If there's a wicked way, let me see it. Let me repent of it. Cleanse me. You get to Psalm 51.

Created me a pure heart. You've shown me what's wicked within, and I'm helpless, so just give me a new heart.

You see, it's the rarity of a God -fearing man or woman. It's so precious, so rare.

And it's someone who's understood what Stuart Halyot means by experiential Calvinism, reformed piety in the best of what that has meant, which is actually just keeping my heart with every means of grace and spiritual discipline at my avail.

We've come out of Matthew 5, 6, and 7 now. Have we already forgotten the warning of Jesus that the way that leads to everlasting life is so narrow, so difficult?

Few, few, few find it. The only ones on it are those that are keeping the heart.

The only ones on the narrow way are those that have a tender heart. A tender heart from God that they don't take for granted.

They ever bear that tenderness to God, and they work it out toward their brothers and sisters, and they work it out in the world around them.

That's the narrow path. That's the only path that leads to life. Well, you may feel as we close now like the man of Romans 7,

O wretch that I am, who will deliver me from a body of death. And I would remind you as Psalm 51 would remind you, as Paul, the apostle, will remind you in Romans 4 and 5.

If you feel like that wretched man, and you don't know how you'll be delivered from this body of death, or how you'll overcome the conditions of this stony heart, the good news is you have a

God who knows how to deliver a body of death and cause a spirit to walk within that body and bring a whole newness of life.

You serve a God and worship a God who can purify your heart and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

So you have every hope that as you seek to give a tender heart to the

Lord and to your neighbor, the Lord will grant you that desire of your heart. He will be the one that keeps your heart tender.

He will be the one that causes you to yield, that causes your mind, your affections, your conscience, your will to be like clay molded into the very impression of Christ our

Savior. A pure heart, a tender heart. A pure heart recognizing impurity cries for a pure heart.

A merciless heart recognizing that lack of mercy cries for mercy and becomes a merciful heart.

A loveless heart recognizing that lovelessness cries to the God of love and the

God of love grants the love of Christ and so the heart becomes lovely. You see, it's life to the dead, feeling, softness, flesh to what was stone.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth but only what is good for necessary edification so that it will impart grace to the hearers and do not grieve the

Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. So let all bitterness, all wrath, anger, clamor and evil speaking be put away with all malice and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as Christ forgave you.

Amen. Let's pray. Father, we thank

You for Your Word, Lord. Give us these pure hearts, Lord. Forgive us. We see the condition of sin within, not just without.

Lord, we recognize that Your Spirit is at war against our flesh, Lord. We see how helpless we are and we recognize, as You said, that we can do nothing apart from You.

And so we pray, Lord, be our help, be our refuge, be the vine that makes us fruitful,

Lord, be our high priest that opens a way of boldness to a throne of grace in a time of need.

Be the one who bends in all that perfect humility to cleanse our hands and our feet knowing that in You, by faith and repentance, we've already been baptized, washed, made clean in Your sight.

Lord, forgive us as individuals for not inviting You and seeking for You to ever examine us and expose wicked ways within us to keep our hearts tender to You, our conscience soft toward You.

Help us, Lord, as individuals to do this and help us corporately, Lord, when we consider our tenderness toward one another.

Lord, forgive us if there's been any malice, any friction, any unrepentant sin or harboring of clamor or bitterness.

Lord, root it out, expose it for the evil that it is. And in repentance, Lord, bear fruit of putting on kindness and tender mercies coming from a tender heart.

And let it not just be for our sake, Lord, but for the sake of the lost around us. Lord, give us a tender heart for them.

Let us be reminded that the only difference between our lives and their lives is You, Your grace.

And so, Lord, in that humility, may we long for them, long to see souls brought from darkness into light.

Lord, give us hearts to pray, knees to bend, spines to stand for these very things.

But, Lord, with all of that, and above all of that, give us a tender heart, a heart like our