What Has Your Heart?

"The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your descendants, and you will love him with all your heart and all your soul so that you will live." (Deuteronomy 30:6)

Everyone Worships

I want to start with something that is true of every single person in this room, whether you believe in God or not. Everybody worships.

The novelist David Foster Wallace was not a Christian, and in 2005 he stood up in front of a graduating class and told them there is really no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get, he said, is what we worship. And he was right. The Bible said it thousands of years before he did.

Now, what does it mean to worship something? Our English word comes from an old word, worth-ship. To worship something is to show what it's worth to you. It's to give it your heart, to look to it for life, to build your sense of who you are on top of it. Whatever your heart treats as most worth having, that's what you worship. It might be your career, or your family, or your reputation. It might be the approval of the people around you, or being right, or being in control. Most of those are good things. But when any good thing becomes the thing your heart can't live without, it has become your god.

If you're here this morning and you're not sure you believe any of this, stay with me, because this is your question too. You're worshiping something. We all are.

And I want to suggest that this isn't only true out there, in the rest of the week. It's true in here, in church, in the middle of worship itself. Let me tell you how I learned that.

At my last assignment, before I became the pastor of that church, the pastor before me asked me a question. I don't remember what the question was, but I remember where I was sitting. I was in the back. And I remember telling him how amazing it was that so many people were disconnected in worship. People were on their phones, flipping through the hymnal, talking, staring out the window. It was one of those moments when you realize our minds aren't always where they need to be.

But what took me longer to see was this: while I sat back there watching everybody else, my own heart wasn't worshiping either. I was so busy grading the room that I gave God nothing.

So the question this morning isn't whether you worship. You do. The question is, what makes worship real, and worthy of God? What is the worship God actually receives? And to answer that, we have to go underneath the outward forms, all the way down to the heart.

Lips Near, Hearts Far

Jesus put his finger right on this. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, he said, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. They worship me in vain" (Matthew 15:8-9).

Notice what Jesus does. He doesn't criticize the singing or the prayers or the gathering. He says there's an inner essence of worship and an outer expression of worship, and it's possible to have all of the outer and none of the inner. And when that happens, he says, the worship is vain. For Jesus, that kind of worship amounts to zero.

In English, the word vain has two meanings. It means empty, and it means full of yourself. Jesus meant empty. But the reason that worship is empty is that it's full of self. So you can do as many good deeds as you want, and go to as many church services as you want, and never truly worship, if nothing is happening in your heart toward God. All real and true worship is heartfelt.

Now, why does that happen to people who love God? Jesus told a story about good seed that never grew, because the worries of this life, the pull of money, and the desire for other things grew up around it and choked it out (Mark 4:18-19). Sometimes it's the world around us, the noise and the pressure and the things we chase. And sometimes it's the world inside us.

Let me go a little deeper, because the sin beneath the sin is always a question of worship. When I sat in that back row grading everyone, what was I really doing? I was protecting something. My sense of being right. My sense of being a little better than the people around me. In the middle of worshiping God, I was worshiping myself. And most of us do some version of that. So let me ask you a few honest questions. What does your mind drift to when it has nowhere it has to be? Whose approval would crush you to lose? Where do you run first when you're afraid? Your answers will tell you what your heart is really treating as worth the most.

The apostle Paul said this to religious people in Rome who were trusting the outward sign that they belonged to God: "True circumcision is not something visible in the flesh... circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not the letter. That person's praise is not from people but from God" (Romans 2:28-29).

Circumcision was the sign God gave Abraham, the mark that you belonged to God's people. But you could carry that mark on your body while your heart was a thousand miles away. For us, the outward marks look different: baptism, membership, knowing the right answers, being here every Sunday. Those are good things, but they can never stand in for a heart the Spirit has made new.

So what is the inner, authentic, Godward experience of the heart that we call the essence of worship? Moses gives us the beginning of the answer: "The Lord your God will circumcise your heart... and you will love him with all your heart and all your soul so that you will live." In other words, God goes to work on the inside, where no one else can reach. He cuts away what keeps pulling our hearts away from him, and he fills the heart with the very character of Jesus. Worthy worship begins with a heart God himself has made whole.

What We Cannot Do, God Promises

But that raises an obvious question. How does God do that? How does a divided heart become whole?

To answer that, we have to go back to the moment God first asked for it. The book of Deuteronomy is Moses speaking to Israel near the end of his life, about forty years after they came out of Egypt, on the edge of the promised land. And in chapters 9 and 10, he makes them remember the worst moment of their history. While he was up on the mountain receiving God's law, their parents made a golden calf and worshiped it. Moses came down, saw the worship, which led him straight back to the hearts of the people, and he shattered the tablets. And yet God called Moses back up the mountain, gave him new tablets, and renewed the covenant with a people who didn't deserve it. And with that story of a second chance fresh in their minds, Moses said, "Circumcise your hearts and don't be stiff-necked any longer" (Deuteronomy 10:16).

What I find interesting in that moment is how easy it is, when we are left alone with our hearts, to revert back to our former selves. The calf was made while Moses was away. The people decided he was taking too long. Their bodies had left Egypt, but their hearts never did.

And they couldn't do what God asked. Why not? Because the heart that needed cutting was the very heart holding the knife. You can make yourself come to church. You can make yourself say the right words. But you cannot make yourself love God with all your heart, any more than you can make yourself love anything. Even David, the man after God's own heart, didn't try to fix himself. He prayed, "God, create a clean heart for me" (Psalm 51:10).

So near the end of his life, Moses gave them a promise: "The Lord your God will circumcise your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:6). What God had commanded, God now promised to do himself.

Centuries later, a young man named Stephen stood before the religious leaders and preached the last sermon of his life. He said of Israel in the wilderness, "Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him. Instead, they pushed him away, and in their hearts turned back to Egypt" (Acts 7:39). And then he looked at the leaders in front of him and said, "You stiff-necked people with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are always resisting the Holy Spirit. As your ancestors did, you do also" (Acts 7:51). And they stoned him for it.

Standing there guarding the coats of the men throwing the stones was a young man named Saul (Acts 7:58). He never forgot it. Years later, as Paul, he prayed, "When the blood of your witness Stephen was being shed, I stood there giving approval" (Acts 22:20). And the man who once stood there with an uncircumcised heart would one day write that true circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit.

And how does the Spirit do it? Through Christ. "You were also circumcised in him with a circumcision not done with hands... in the circumcision of Christ" (Colossians 2:11). Paul ties our new hearts to what Jesus did on the cross. Isaiah said the Savior would be "cut off from the land of the living" (Isaiah 53:8), and because Jesus gave himself up to death for us, the Spirit can do in our hearts what we could never do ourselves.

Humility

So what happened to Saul? He stood with the Pharisees, watching, while Stephen, full of grace and power, looked up and saw Jesus. That day stayed with him, and later, on the road to Damascus, Jesus himself stopped him and humbled him. And that's always where God begins. When God pursues a heart, he begins by humbling it.

Now, humility is a strange thing. The moment you start checking your own heart to see how humble you are, it slips away. Keller once said humility is so shy that if you start talking about it, it leaves. Piper built on that and said humility flourishes when we stand at a window looking out at the greatness of Christ, and it disappears when we turn around and stand at a mirror. You'll never find humility staring at yourself. It only shows up when you're looking at Jesus. Even when David prayed, "Search me, God, and know my heart" (Psalm 139:23), he was asking God to do the looking.

If you're not a Christian, humility is where you stop trusting your own record, and you look and see Jesus. That's what happened to Paul. He had every outward credential a person could have: circumcised the eighth day, a Pharisee, blameless in the law. And when he saw Jesus, he said, "I consider everything to be a loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:8). He had seen someone so much greater that his record stopped mattering.

But humility is just as important for those of us who have walked with Jesus for years. Maybe we need it more, because pride has a way of growing right inside the religious life. It grows from knowing your Bible. It grows from serving others. It grows from showing up when others don't.

C.S. Lewis said a proud person is "always looking down on things and people," and as long as you're looking down, you can't see what's above you. That was me in the back row. Jesus told a story about it (Luke 18:9-14). Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a faithful, religious Pharisee, and he stood up and prayed, "God, I thank you that I'm not like other people... or even like this tax collector." Think about what he did. He went to the house of God to pray and spent his prayer looking down at the man in the back. And that man couldn't even lift his eyes. He prayed, "God, have mercy on me, a sinner!" And Jesus said that man went home right with God.

And when we finally look up, do you know who we see? We see the One who had every right to sit in the judge's seat, and he got up out of it. He emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and humbled himself all the way to death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8). That's the humble mind we learn from Christ. There is a sickness in the heart that needs to be cleansed, in sinners and saints alike. Humility opens our eyes to see it, and God cleanses us more and more from one part of it, our pride and our vanity, so that we can welcome faith.

Humility is recognizing our need, and recognizing who can meet it.

I struggle with this. Every day I have to wake up and pray, Father, check my pride, in every conversation, every inward thought, every decision I make. Why? Because the moment I start living for what people think of me, I've stopped looking at Jesus.

The gospel does something for us in this that nothing else can. Most of us live every day in a kind of courtroom. We're on trial, and the verdict keeps changing. A compliment, and we're acquitted. A criticism, and we're condemned. Paul says something remarkable about that courtroom: "It is of little importance to me that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I don't even judge myself... It is the Lord who judges me" (1 Corinthians 4:3-4). Paul had stepped out of the courtroom, because in Christ the verdict was already in.

My heart, as it stands right now, is that people would see me as someone trying to be faithful with what God has entrusted to me, not because it profits me or gives me praise, but because it might help me serve them better.

The approval of others was never meant to hold up your heart.

Faith

If the approval of others can't hold up your heart, something has to. That's where faith comes in. Once we see our true heart and the disease that lies within, God renews and cleanses us by faith. Peter said it about the first believers who weren't Jewish: God made no distinction between us and them, "cleansing their hearts by faith" (Acts 15:9).

But we have to be clear about what faith is. James says, "You believe that God is one. Good! Even the demons believe, and they shudder" (James 2:19). The demons have perfect theology. They know exactly who God is, and nothing in them has changed. So faith has to be more than believing the right things about the unseen.

In the summer of 1859, a tightrope walker named Charles Blondin stretched a rope across the gorge below Niagara Falls, and thousands of people came out to watch him cross it. He crossed it again and again, and every time, the crowd believed a little more that he could do it. Then that August he carried a man across on his back. His manager, Harry Colcord, climbed onto his shoulders, and the two of them went out over the gorge. Colcord said later that out in the middle, where nothing steadied the rope, Blondin began to totter and sway, and all he could do was hold on.

The crowd believed something true about Charles Blondin, and they went home impressed, but the same as they came. Harry trusted him with his life. That's faith.

So what does it look like to trust Jesus with your whole weight? It means letting him into the places of your heart you've walled off.

Faith is powerful. John Wesley said a living faith is "powerful through God for tearing down strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:4). A stronghold is a fortress, something dug in and walled up, and every one of us has a few. Some of those strongholds are around us: the things everyone says until we believe them. Follow your heart. You deserve it. Look out for number one. But the Bible says the heart is more deceitful than anything else (Jeremiah 17:9). And some of the strongholds are within us. Sin bends the way we think, so we reach our verdicts first and find our reasons afterward. We decide someone will never change, or that God feels far away so he must be far away, or that we've gone too far for him to want us back.

And underneath all of that, most of us are carrying on an argument with God. If he really loved me, he wouldn't have let that happen. I'll forgive them when they've earned it. I know better about this one part of my life. We rehearse those arguments so often that we start winning them, and every argument we win against God is another wall around a part of our heart he isn't allowed into. Faith takes every one of those thoughts captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). It hands the argument back to him and lets him have the last word.

So let me ask you. What argument have you been winning against God that you need to lose?

And think about this. If by faith we believe that Jesus gave himself for us, that he forgives us and reconciles us, even me, to the Father, and that we have redemption through his blood, then how does that same faith not have the power to cleanse the heart? John puts both in one sentence: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). Sin no longer rules over you (Romans 6:14). You are no longer forced to obey it.

That's why humility matters so much. Without it, the heart will not confess its need, and if the heart does not confess, there is no cleansing. But when a heart finally confesses and is cleansed, it has something to say. It can testify of Christ: he took my sin, and he made me clean.

Hope

And something beautiful happens when we testify about God. God testifies about us. Paul says, "The Spirit himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God's children" (Romans 8:16). That is where hope begins.

Hope is the next part of a circumcised heart. It's the Spirit's living proof that humility and faith are at work in us. Hope bears witness that we belong to God, and that our Father gives his children good things (Matthew 7:11). "We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure" (Hebrews 6:19). My joy is anchored in someone, and his Spirit witnesses to my spirit that I belong to God.

Why does that anchor matter so much? Because a heart that is unsure where it stands with God performs. It watches, it compares, it grades, and it needs approval. That isn't assurance in God.

Jesus told a story about exactly this kind of heart. We usually call it the parable of the prodigal son, but there are two sons in it. The younger son ran off and wasted everything. The older son stayed home his whole life and did everything right. And when the younger son came home and the father threw him a party, the older son stood outside and refused to go in. He said, "Look, I have been slaving many years for you" (Luke 15:29). Keller pointed out that both sons were lost. The younger son was lost in his rebellion, and the older son was lost in his goodness. He lived in his father's house like a hired hand, watching his brother, grading him, angry that he never got what he thought he'd earned. And the father went out to him too, and said, "Son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours" (Luke 15:31). He was a son the whole time. He just never lived like one.

Paul says, "You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear. Instead, you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father!'" (Romans 8:15). A slave performs, because his place depends on it. A child calls out to his father, because his place was never in question.

So hope is joy, not fear. Underneath all the performing, the heart is asking one question: Am I worthy to be loved? And the Spirit answers it by telling you that you are loved. "God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The Spirit whispers, I am yours, and you are mine. And Jesus prayed for this very thing, that just as he is in the Father and the Father is in him, we would be in them (John 17:21).

When that finally lands in a heart, something happens that words can't hold. David said, "Taste and see that the Lord is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in him!" (Psalm 34:8). There's a difference between reading about honey and tasting it. You can know everything about God and never once taste him. But when you do, the heart can't stay quiet. John could hardly contain himself: "See what great love the Father has given us that we should be called God's children, and we are!" (1 John 3:1). It's the slave finding out he's a son. It's the older brother finally walking in to the party. It's the man in the back row who stops grading the room and starts to sing.

And joy and hope produce love. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).

Love

What is it that cries out, "Abba, Father"? It can't be pride. It can't be selfishness. Only love can do that, the very love Jesus has for his Father, poured into our hearts by the Spirit (Romans 5:5; Galatians 4:6). And that's what completes a whole heart: real, Christlike love.

Saint Augustine said that the deepest problem of the human heart is disordered love. We love good things in the wrong order. We love comfort, approval, family, success, even ministry, more than we love God, and those good things start to sit on a throne they were never built for. Love for God puts everything back in its place. We still love people. We still enjoy God's good gifts. But we love them in him and for him.

Mark tells us about a young man who came to Jesus who had kept the commandments since he was a boy. He had the outward life down. And Mark says, "Looking at him, Jesus loved him," and then said, "You lack one thing" (Mark 10:21). Jesus told him to let go of what he loved most and follow him, and the man went away grieving, because he had many possessions. He had everything on the outside and a divided heart on the inside. Something else had his heart. And notice the order: Jesus asked for his whole heart because he loved him.

God's love always comes first. He loved us while we were still sinners. But so many of us want to feel his love without letting it change us. We skip humility. We skip faith and hope. And we try to go straight to feeling loved, without letting God cut away what's in the way. We want love without the circumcision.

We refuse the hardship and the pain that come when what we have loved is cut away from us. But God never cuts to leave us scarred and empty. He cuts so that we can have real life. That's the promise of our text: God circumcises the heart so that you will love him with all your heart, "so that you will live."

So what does that look like on an ordinary Tuesday? When God has your whole heart, you don't love the people in your life less. You love them better, because you're no longer asking them to be your god. You can love your spouse without needing them to fill what only God can fill. You can work hard without your job deciding whether you're worth anything. When a disappointment comes, it hurts, but it doesn't take everything from you, because the one thing you can't lose is still yours. When someone criticizes you, you can listen, because your heart isn't resting on their verdict. And when you walk into church on Sunday, you aren't coming to be entertained or to grade the room. You're coming home to the One your heart already loves most.

When love takes the seat we have ruled from, Christ sits there and reigns without a rival, and our joy comes from that very circumcision, as the spirit returns to God who gave it. John Wesley said it as strongly as anyone ever has: "Whoever is not happy, yea, happy in God, is not a Christian." He meant it as an invitation. God is offering you the deepest happiness there is, and it's in him.

Our songs, our giving, and our service all matter to God, but underneath every one of them, he is after the living sacrifice of the heart (Romans 12:1). "The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God" (Psalm 51:17).

But if God wants a whole heart, and none of us could ever give him one on our own, then where does that leave us? It leaves us looking at the only one who ever did.

The True Worshiper

There has only ever been one person whose heart was never divided in worship. Jesus loved his Father with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his strength. He never once sat in the back row of his own heart. Every word, every step, every breath was for the Father's glory. He said, "I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me" (John 6:38).

And yet on the cross, the one whole heart in all of history was given up for us. The Son who had always cried out, "Abba, Father," cried out instead, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" (Mark 15:34). He was abandoned so that we could be adopted. He gave himself up so that the Spirit could make our hearts new, and pour into us the same love he has for the Father, so that we can love God with all our heart too. He cried out as one forsaken so that we could cry "Abba" forever.

And Keller would remind us of something else from the parable of the two sons. In that story, no one goes out to find the younger brother. But we have a true and better older brother, Jesus, who left the Father's house and came all the way out to where we were, to bring us home at the cost of his own life.

So let's come back to our question. What makes worship real, and worthy of God? What is the inner, authentic, Godward experience of the heart that we call the essence of worship?

The inner essence of worship is a heart that God has made whole.

It's a heart that has been humbled, so it isn't sitting in the judge's seat anymore. It's a heart that has put its whole weight on Jesus. It's a heart that knows it's home, crying out, "Abba, Father." And it's a heart that loves God more than anything he could ever give it. Those aren't four steps we climb to earn a whole heart. They're what God's grace forms in a heart as he makes it whole.

And in that wholeness comes joy. Peter called it inexpressible and glorious joy (1 Peter 1:8), joy too big for words, joy that doesn't come from anything in this world, the joy of a heart that has tasted God and found him better than everything it was chasing.

That is worship.

So let me ask you one more time. What has your heart?

The God who asks for your whole heart is the God who promises to make it whole.

If you've never come to Jesus, this is where it begins. Come to him with empty hands. He said, "The one who comes to me I will never cast out" (John 6:37).

And if you've followed him for years but your heart is still divided, ask him to make it whole. The same faith that received his forgiveness can receive his cleansing.

Let's pray the words of an old hymn together:

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love; here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.