Gathering – Deuteronomy 30:1-10

Much has changed since these ancient words were written and yet nothing has changed; heart disease is still our leading cause of death. I’m not speaking of the heart that pumps blood through our bodies, rather the heart which is the well spring of spiritual life within us.

In our passage Moses is speaking of Israel’s heart condition as a qualifier to inherit their promised land and the blessings contained in it. When they get their hearts right, the Lord will then gather them and set them up in a place of abundance and prosperity. This sounds good until we see the word “all” – the most dominant word in this passage.

        Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live. 

“All” is an impossibly high bar to clear, isn’t it?  It would require a miraculously true heart to obey all the commands. The good news embedded in Moses sermon is the promise of new hearts. He calls it a circumcised heart and from it shall flow Life.

Then the Lord your God will prosper you abundantly in all the work of your hand, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your cattle and in the produce of your ground.

God’s conditional pledge through Moses clearly includes material blessing. Oh how appealing this feature is to us western Christians living inside the American Dream! With this Old Testament promise and the American economic engine, truly all things are possible with God. However, if we will see what God has promised in the New Covenant, American dreams of material prosperity will go strangely dim in the light of God’s glory and grace, in Christ.

Christ is now our life because the Holy Spirit has taken up residence in our spirits. Christians are a new specie of being because the Holy Spirit lives in them. We are the offspring of God. This is a bit larger idea than just getting our souls saved and going to heaven. It means living life now as God’s children and processing everything through that new reality. This is the abundant life Jesus promised. Living out of this reality is the only way to have an all-in life.

        Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live. 

For a variety of reasons, we still have heart problems. Blinded by the want of material prosperity, we can fail to see the abundance of what we already have, independent of a single dollar, in Christ. If the Old Testament promise of material blessing is mingled with our dreams, we will not only fail to experience abundance in Christ, we will struggle to even know the adequacy of Jesus Christ. Our problem? We not only want God, we want his stuff.

Even a new heart is not immune from deception and Western culture has it own particular version. With our can-do, American spirit, which has produced more material wealth than any previous nation, we are set up to miss the central point of life – which is Jesus Christ. This Man, this second Adam is our elder brother and the first born of the new race of men. This Man is our life, independent of any of our doing or having. This makes being an all-in follower of Jesus tough when the cultural air you breathe is pregnant with doing and being. However, once our eyes are liberated, we will see these lies embedded everywhere, driving nearly everything … except the kingdom of God.

When doing precedes being, and getting precedes giving, all dreams, both American and Kingdom are dying. Unless the true prophets and apostles rise up and define the Kingdom of God, clearly delineating it from America and any political party, air is rapidly escaping our balloon. The heights to which America has risen as a nation has been courtesy of the Kingdom of God and its eternal values, a reality our nation is systematically denying.

Is there any hope we might remain aloft? I believe so but its not in a revival of Reagan Republicans or Roosevelt Democrats. If it comes, it will once again be courtesy of God’s grace in Christ, expressed by God’s children who have been revived to live out of their new hearts. Their lives will reveal Brook’s “without attachment” piece of the American Dream. They will be those whose surrender to Christ’s rule was validated by their self denial, their open handed generosity and their creativity in sharing the abundance entrusted to them. Listen to the second half of verse two, from America …

America! America! / God mend thine ev’ry flaw, / Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law.

We have much to pray and think about.

Father, only you know how to raise up children in the Truth. Help us to abandon ourselves to your fatherhood. Thank you for our new hearts. Teach us to live from them. Jesus is the only one who might save us. He is our only hope of life. May your children be set free, revealing your fullest transformational intentions. Let the world see Jesus reigning in individual hearts, transforming us into his image. Expose our entanglement and detach us from this world. Draw us back to simplicity of devotion to Christ  – our only true abundance. For your name’s sake. Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

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