Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Psalm 51b
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  June 9, 2019

The Day of Pentecost is sort of the Holy Spirit’s highlight reel. He came in the rushing wind, in the sign of fire which came to rest over the disciples’ heads, and especially the gift of tongues which allowed those disciples to preach the gospel in languages previously unknown to them! The result? 3000 people believed in Jesus and the Christian Church was born. It is a day worth celebrating, for certain. But what does it teach you and me today about the Holy Spirit? Where is the rushing wind? Where’s the flame? Why isn’t anyone bursting into tongues? We believe that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, lives and works among us, but sometimes it seems like he doesn’t move as powerfully as he used to. But the reality is quite the opposite. The Holy Spirit is most powerfully at work, not when he produces outward signs, but when he operates on human hearts. Did you catch the greatest thing the Holy Spirit did on Pentecost? It happened right after Peter’s message. He ended his sermon that day by saying, “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” And Luke records: When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart… The Holy Spirit is first and foremost a heart surgeon. His best work on Pentecost was the unseen way he created faith in Jesus so that hearts were cut by the reality of their sin and subsequently healed through forgiveness and baptism. That is also how the Spirit works among us today. Any time the Word is preached, he puts on his gloves, snaps on his breathing shield, and goes to work. Our text today, Psalm 51, is a paramount example of this: Holy Spirit Heart Surgery.

The heading gives us the context in which it was written: “A psalm by David. When Nathan the prophet came to him after he had gone to Bathsheba.” A thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, David was king over Israel. In a vulgar abuse of power, he slept with Bathsheba, the wife of one of his loyal soldiers. She became pregnant and David tried to cover it up, but when the plan failed, he arranged to have her husband murdered. After a respectful time had passed for Bathsheba to mourn, David took her into the palace as his wife. In other words, he moved on. Clothed in power and insulated by admirers, there would be no consequence or cost—not in his political life, not in his personal life, not even in his spiritual life. Or so he thought. David had patched up the cracks in his brittle heart and painted over it a thin veneer of righteousness. But God knew its true condition and the Holy Spirit came to perform surgery through the words of a prophet. The prophet Nathan came to David and set him up by telling a story. He told him of a rich man with many cattle who stole the one, beloved lamb of a poor man and slaughtered it just to eat with a guest. David burned with anger against the man and said, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die!” But then Nathan turned the tables: “You are the man.” David didn’t just steal a lamb, but a man’s wife and then killed him as well! As he said, the man who did this must die… David had spoken his own sentence. In that moment, the Holy Spirit had opened David’s chest cavity and swung the hammer of God’s Word. And even though it was taped up and painted over, this time David’s heart shattered. All he could say was the truth: “I have sinned against God.” His heart was crushed and broken by his own sin…which, as it happens, is just the kind of heart the Holy Spirit likes to operate on.

The first step in Holy Spirit heart surgery is a broken heart. You see, after Nathan’s visit, David composed the inspired words of Psalm 51 and towards the end of it David writes: “A broken and crushed heart, O God, you will not despise.” God will never despise someone who is honest about their sin and whose heart breaks because of it. And that is exactly what we hear from David. In Psalm 51, we hear from a man who has come to a deeper knowledge of sin itself. David not only says that he is sinful from conception, he not only says that what he has done deserves serious consequences, but a man whose heart is broken because he understands that sin itself is first and foremost an offense to God. Yes, David had caused Bathsheba to commit adultery, he had murdered her husband, he had broken the trust of everyone in the kingdom whether they knew it or not, but David said to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” And he offered the only sacrifice he had and the only one God wanted: a broken and crushed heart.

When was the last time your heart broke over sin? When was the last time the hammer of God’s Word shattered that rock within your ribcage? Has it been a long time? Maybe it’s hard to be broken hearted over your sin because it isn’t nearly as severe as David’s. You know, it sometimes seems if someone is really broken up about sin, then they must have done something truly terrible. But therein lies the rub: What breaks our heart about sin shouldn’t be the severity of the consequences, but simply the fact that all sin is an offense to our God. Sin breaks the heart of God. That is what should break our hearts no matter what kind of sin we commit.

Let me give you an example of this distinction: When you get into an argument with someone and say something that hurts them, does your heart break because you haven’t spoken in love and sinned against God? Or do you mainly feel annoyed because the relationship is strained, because your next conversation is going to be rough? Do you regret the consequences or do you grieve for the heart of God? Or you just think about the sins that are committed in private because there are no apparent immediate consequences. There is no way we would do commit these sins in public because there would be shame, people would think much less of us! We commit these sins because only God can see us and sometimes our hearts don’t break while we’re offending him, just so long as no one else knows. We patch up and paint over our brittle hearts and move on with no outward consequences. And yet while there may not be an obvious immediate consequence for every sin, there is an eternal one. That’s why David said in this Psalm, “Do not cast me from your presence. Do not take your Holy Spirit from me.” Because there is a place where we could be separated from God’s presence forever, a lonely place of eternal suffering where the Holy Spirit is taken away from us.

My friends, let us pray to the Holy Spirit for tender consciences that understand the true nature of sin. May our hearts break over sin because it breaks God’s heart. May we pray to God like David did, offering up to him the only sacrifice that is pleasing, a broken and crushed heart. That’s the first step in Holy Spirit heart surgery.

The second step is a heart transplant.  David says, “Create in me a pure heart, O God.” Heart transplants always remind of a guy named Greg, who I met during my vicar year in Michigan. Greg was a contract small plane and helicopter pilot. He took me flying once and we talked at length. He told me about some of the people who would hire him to fly them around. He told me how he would teach people to fly and how he sometimes had to completely take back control mid-flight. But he also told me that he sometimes flies as an on-call medical transport for accidents. Well, one Thursday night he came to worship and told me that I shouldn’t be concerned if he left during the service because he was on-call if there was an accident. He was a little more concerned than usual because there was a lot of snow on the roads that night. And sure enough, about halfway through my sermon he looked at his phone, got up, and left quickly. The next time I saw him I asked what the call was and he told me that he flew a helicopter to pick up the heart of an 18-year-old who had died in a car crash and fly it to a transplant match. I wonder what it would be like to be the recipient of the donated heart. There must be such a profound sense of thankfulness. It isn’t even like a kidney transplant; no one has two hearts. In every case, in order to receive a heart transplant, the recipient knows that somebody had to die.

And the same thing is true for the spiritual heart transplant that the Holy Spirit creates in us. Jesus is the only one who could provide a pure heart. And something more than profound thanks washes over me when I realize that Jesus didn’t die in an accident. It was by his own choice that he laid down his life so that you and I could receive his heart. It is the heart of Christ that the Holy Spirit stitches into us through faith. Our broken and crushed hearts are removed, our sins are forgiven, and through faith we receive the pure heart of our Savior. His precious blood pumps through our veins and God can rightly call us his children.

I imagine any transplant recipient would live every day with a sense of thanks for the gift of life they received through their donor. Every time they noticed their heartbeat they would think of the life given for their heart. May the same be true of us. Can you find your pulse? Let your own heartbeat be a reminder of the life given for you, of your donor and Savior, Jesus. And don’t forget the surgeon who made it all possible. Let your heartbeat also remind you of the Holy Spirit who lives and works in you to strengthen your faith and guide you in purity. Not just on the Day of Pentecost, but on every day may we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit!” Amen.