Hearts That Belong to Him

I once went to the store because I’d seen an advertisement in the paper that said it was selling exactly what I wanted. When I got to the store, however, I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I asked one of the clerks. To my surprise, he told me, “We don’t have any. We never had any.” “But,” I protested, “they were in your ad in the paper this morning.” “Well, sir, just because we had them in our ad doesn’t necessarily mean we have them in the store.” Silly me, believing that if a store advertises it sells a certain product, it will in fact actually carry that product in the store!

God has the same kind of expectation when He looks into our hearts. God desires that the faith we profess and practice will, in fact, be the same faith He finds inside us. More than just what we advertise on the outside, God desires that our hearts BELONG to Him.

Too often, what God finds is that we are guilty of false advertising—with hearts far from Him. That is certainly what Jesus found in the scribes and Pharisees who came to Him from Jerusalem. They believe that in Jesus ignoring “the tradition of the elders,” they have found a way to discredit Him (vv. 1–5). But Jesus then uses their abuse of those traditions to unmask their hypocrisy. Their hypocrisy is that they use their profession of love for God as a mask to excuse or hide the evil they harbor in their hearts (vv. 6–8). As an example of their hypocrisy, the Lord points to their use of the traditions to allow them to circumvent the Fourth Commandment (vv. 9–13): “Honor your father and mother.”

When our profession of faith and outward works are not matched by a heart of faith, we are guilty of false advertising. When we do and say all the right religious things because that’s what we’re supposed to do, or when we do good things simply because our parents make us or our spouse wants us to, or when we do all the right things as a mask behind which we hide our sinful behavior, we are guilty of honoring God with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him. While we may fool others and even ourselves, God is not fooled. He doesn’t want worship that is just lip service. He wants our hearts!

God so desires that our hearts belong to Him that He gave His own Son. God doesn’t say one thing and then do another. The pages of Holy Scripture record for us how our God does more than just pay lip service to His desire to restore the world to Himself. The lips of God’s prophets—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, John the Baptist—announced again and again God’s promise to give the world a Savior from sin and death. And the Holy Scriptures also record for us the story of all God actually did in order to keep His promises—preserving his people through the flood, the Red Sea, from the Philistines, from Babylon. Our God didn’t just make promises; He kept them all, finally, by giving His own Son to die. That was no lip service; that tore out the Father’s heart! Performing more than lip service, just like the Father, Christ went willingly to the cross. All His words of teaching have been backed up with that action of deepest, heartfelt love and real commitment.

In the Sacraments, the God who loves the world that much continues to act in our lives to make clear that His love includes you and me. In Holy Baptism, He has called us each by name and adopted us as His own sons and daughters. In the gift of His Son’s body and blood, in, with, and under the bread and wine of Holy Communion, He makes clear that His love for us is more than just a promise; He gives us the very body and blood given on the cross, and these are given to each of us personally!

In doing all this, the Lord strips away our hypocrisy so that our hearts do become His. In the same way, Jesus stripped away the mask of hypocrisy from the religious leaders in our Gospel because He desired that they turn from their ways and be forgiven.

Do you remember the story of King David? After he committed adultery, David went to great lengths, even murder, to cover up what he had done. Then he went right back to living a very religious life as he always had. At that point, though, David’s outward devotion to God was only a mask used to hide his guilt. God loved David too much for the king’s hypocrisy to continue. That’s why God sent the prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin. God wanted more than outward obedience—He wanted David’s heart. God wanted David’s faith to be real again, so He stripped away David’s mask. He confronted David so that the guilty would confess his sin. God confronted David because He wanted David to know that He forgave him.

God loves you and me too much to allow us to continue to wear our faith as nothing more than a mask to hide our hypocrisy. Through His word of Law, our loving Father strips away our masks. More than anything God desires to speak to us His word of forgiveness and grace. He acts in our lives because in the place of an empty shell of religion He desires to give us lives and hearts that belong to Him!

There’s no false advertising with God. What you see is what you get. What we see—made clearly visible in the life and death of Jesus—is a heart of love that wouldn’t let us go our empty way. And what we get then is that loving heart for all eternity, His loving heart becomes our loving heart. So let’s give ourselves and all that we do over to God and let the false advertising that we so often practice come to an end. Amen.