As we head back to our future, augmenting our online ministry by slowly re-opening our campus and re-imagining ministry in this new world, I’m inviting us as a community of grace to ask God to prepare our hearts.
Last week I encouraged you to memorize the following verse and to repeat it throughout the day:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.
This week, in addition to internalizing that verse several times each day, I want to encourage us to do a heart check: Do I have a tough heart?
A few years ago concerns were raised about the creation of safe places on our college campuses. These weren’t places for student’s whose lives were in danger. These were for students who were emotionally traumatized with ideas or opinions that challenged their own!
What these students need is not a safe place, but a tougher heart.
A tough heart is not afraid to wrestle with other ideas. A tough heart is not afraid to peel away areas of disagreement to find something worth learning. A tough heart it not threatened by being stretched with new concepts or ways of seeing the world. A tough heart is not afraid to change one’s mind based on new insights or information.
The religious elite in the days of Jesus did not have tough hearts. The new storyline of grace Jesus proclaimed threatened them. They were so committed to their safe spaces of the law and doing things as they had always done that they missed the new thing God was up to.
The opposite of a tough heart is not a soft heart. It’s a closed heart. A heart closed by fear. A heart at dis-ease with new insights. A heart afraid it might have been wrong or that it didn’t have all of the facts.
For many adults, our safe place is FOX News, or CNN, or MSNBC…places where we don’t have to be challenged or where our views are constantly affirmed. There’s nothing wrong with having views, and beliefs. The challenge for us is that we often shut down great insights because of one thing said with which we don’t agree. In the process we rob ourselves of the blowing winds of the Spirit of God.
When it comes to navigating this world as we follow Jesus into it, God wants to forge tough hearts in us…hearts tough enough to hang on to what we know to be true while opening ourselves up to something new God wants to teach us or do in us.
A tough heart is a teachable heart. A tough heart is a learning heart. A tough heart isn’t afraid to look at new ideas. A tough heart is rooted in the grace and truth of our Creator.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths. (Proverbs 3:5-6)
To love the Lord our God with all our heart, and our neighbors as ourselves, is to have a tough heart…a heart tough enough to be open to the needs of our neighbors, their stories, their world-views, and to be open to God’s call to respond in grace and humility.
