Lent: a time for new hearts (Is your heart in your mouth?)
Well dear brothers and sisters…is your heart in your mouth? It should be! We should all be walking around with our heart in our mouth. (You might be wondering at this point what on earth is about to happen next!)
When people talk about having their heart in their mouth, it’s a way of saying they are very scared, nervous and frightened—“my heart leapt into my mouth when the lightning struck.” But that’s not the kind of ‘heart in mouth’ I mean. And it’s not what the Apostle Paul talks of in today’s reading either.
In his letter to the Christians at Rome, Paul was addressing the matter of their righteousness and salvation. Just before today’s text, in verse 5, Paul says: “For Moses writes this about righteousness by the law: “The one doing these things will live by them” (Romans 10:5).
Paul was correcting the mistaken idea that a person’s righteousness—and therefore their salvation—could be achieved by their deeds. God’s people in the Old Testament didn’t achieve their own righteousness by how well they obeyed God’s law. The Israelites whom God had given the Commandments to were already the people he had redeemed to be his own. Sure—they were to take God’s commandments seriously, and strive to keep them, just as God still requires of us today. Because when God’s commands are obeyed, the result is good.
Obedience to the law resulted in life and blessing for Israel, but the commandments were never the means by which God’s people achieved their righteousness. That’s why Paul says: “For Moses writes this about righteousness by the law: ‘The one doing these things will live by them.’” Paul is saying that if anyone wants to establish a relationship with God by keeping the commandments, they’ve got to do the whole lot, the whole time.
The Law can only show us how a righteous and holy God demands us to live, but the Law can’t save us. We might know that intellectually, but not know it as well in our hearts. We often we live as though our righteousness before God and relationship with him is based on how well we perform. For example, we might think that if only we could be ‘a better Christian’ then our problems and troubles will cease. Or that our works of charity and sincere religious rituals will earn us an extra dollop of God’s favour. We might catch ourselves thinking that God would be more pleased with us over unbelievers, or even brothers and sisters in our own congregation, because of how morally upstanding we think we are. We might frown upon those in society who don’t meet our expectations, and forget that we don’t meet God’s expectations.
Righteousness by the law is impossible because the issue is one of the heart. We just can’t carry out what we should do. The Law therefore shows us that we all fall well short of God’s requirements, and that he is right in his just sentence of death upon us as sinners. The Law shows us our need for a Saviour outside of ourselves, but it can never be that saviour.
That’s why Paul’s words in today’s text are good news for us: “This is the word of faith which we proclaim: “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
We aren’t righteous by our own works and therefore saved because of the good we might do. Instead we are saved by grace through faith—faith that confesses that Jesus died to take away the sin of the world and its consequences of death by his own death; faith that trusts that he lives and still rules as our Lord today. Paul proclaims: “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Sometimes people can be very proud and boastful of their faith, but even faith itself is a gracious working of God in us, and not something we ever manufactured or conjured up ourselves. We weren’t born with a right concept of righteousness and salvation from God innate within us. We needed to have our ears, minds and hearts opened and made new and alive. This happens when the Holy Spirit goes to work through the gospel proclaimed by someone else from outside of ourselves. Paul says: “This is the word of faith which we proclaim: If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (verses 8 & 9).
The lengths God went to over thousands of years to call various people and reveal his word through them, thereby preserving for us the Holy Scriptures, is in itself is the incredible gracious action of God. And that message was proclaimed to us even though we didn’t deserve to know and experience anything about God and the life he gives. You have heard the word proclaimed and taught to you by others and through that word the Holy Spirit has brought you to faith. You were saved by grace through faith in what God has promised, just like his people Israel of old. The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart!
Saved by grace, through faith. That’s a nice Lutheran-sounding saying, isn’t it? It’s almost a label we use to identify who we are as a church: ‘Saved by grace, through faith’. We might associate that more with Reformation Sunday than the first Sunday of Lent. So why is there this focus today?
Because during these 40 days of Lent the Devil tempts us, just as he tempted Jesus during his 40 days in the desert. It was not a coincidence that the first thing for Jesus following his baptism was to be led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, and overcome him. If Jesus had fallen to Satan’s temptation to do out of self-interest what would benefit him rather than following God’s will for the rescue of the world, then God’s plan of salvation would have become a train wreck.
We are not tempted to turn stones into bread or jump off the Temple. But the Devil tempts us to think that our righteousness before God is dependent on us. If we feel guilty or ashamed, we question whether we could possibly be God’s righteous children. If we don’t feel like we are God’s children, then we figure that we can’t be. That our negative experience means God has abandoned us. The Devil tempts us to think there is always something more that is needed from us in addition to what Jesus has done with his perfect life and obedience, his suffering and death, to make us righteous and pleasing before God. That you need more than faith in what the crucified and risen Christ has done for you to earn your place in your Heavenly Father’s family.
In today’s Gospel reading, we hear that Jesus overcame the devil, right there in the desert, for you, and for all people. How? Not with physical might or strength, but by holding fast to God’s word: “It is written.”
It is written. This is the word of God—the word that Paul is speaking of today: “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart.” This word is God’s promise to you.
When the devil tempts you to believe that you are not righteous and pleasing in God’s sight, that God does not love you and cannot forgive you, that there is still some unfulfilled condition that you must pass before you can stand in the grace of God, turn to what God has said. It is written: “…the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (vv 10:12-13).
“Whoever calls on the name of the Lord”—whoever uses the Lord’s name to call on him, cry out to him…that is the language of faith, belief, trust, not the language of self-confidence, pride, accomplishment or achievement.
But then the devil tempts us another way—to treat God’s grace cheaply. To think that a few simple words without any commitment from us and all is good. We can put God off until later. We don’t really have to deny ourselves and follow Jesus. We are saved by grace through faith—but we can risk treating that truth casually and indifferently, like a catch-phrase. It rolls of the tongue so well…but is it a lived reality springing forth from our heart?
God’s intention for our faith has never just been about a bare minimum—saying the correct theological truths or believing in historical facts about God while keeping him at a distance. It has always been a matter of the heart, even as the Psalm for the beginning of the season of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, says:
O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;
you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:15-17).
God’s call through the prophet Joel to his people was to “rend your hearts, and not your garments.” Is our faith merely a mechanical verbal assent that Jesus was born, died and rose again, and the outward actions that look right?
Lent is a time for wholeheartedly living out our faith. Paul says today: “The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart’. The confession of faith from our lips comes from out of the heart—a heart God has first visited and made new, illumined by the light of the Holy Spirit, when he baptised you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And ever since, God has been at work through his word, so that until the time the Lord returns, your new heart would desire what he does and be fixed on heavenly things, not earthly concerns: following Jesus by gladly hearing and learning his word, rejoicing in your baptism by daily drowning the old sinful nature and rising to new life with Christ, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, seeking to be more like his own compassionate heart and bringing his grace to others.
And waiting vigilantly for Jesus to return at any moment, wholeheartedly rejoicing in the promise we have heard today: If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” and “All who believe in him will not be put to shame.” Amen!
