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Let us pray. God open our ears to your voice, open our eyes to your work, open our hearts

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to your presence, and open our lives to your call. Amen. Our second reading is from the

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prophet Isaiah chapter 44 verses 9 through 20. Let us listen together now for God's Word to us.

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All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit. Their witnesses

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neither see nor know, and so they will be put to shame. Who would fashion a god or cast an image

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that can do no good? All its devotees shall be put to shame. The artisans too are merely human.

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Let them all assemble, let them stand up. They shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.

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The blacksmith works it with a tool over the coals, shaping it with hammers and forging it

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with his strong arm. He becomes hungry and his strength fails. He drinks no water and is faint.

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The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes,

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and marks it with a compass. He makes it in human form with human beauty to be set up in a shrine.

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He cuts down cedars and chooses a home tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of

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the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he

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takes and warms himself. He kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it,

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makes it a carved image and bows down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire. Over this half

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he roasts meat, eats it, and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, I am warm by the fire.

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The rest of it he makes into a god. His idol bows down to it and worships it. He prays to it and

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says, save me for you are my god. They do not know nor do they comprehend for their eyes are

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shut so that they cannot see and their minds as well so they cannot understand. No one considers,

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nor is their knowledge or discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. I also baked

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bread on its coals. I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make of the rest of it an abomination.

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Shall I fall down before a block of wood? He feeds on ashes. A diluted mind has led him astray.

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And he cannot save himself or say, is not this thing in my right hand a fraud? This is the word

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of the Lord. Thanks be to God. So we begin a new series today for the season of Lent looking at

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the greatest commandments. Jesus's answer to that question, what is the greatest? And they are to

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love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength,

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and to love your neighbor as yourself. In his book, The Life We're Looking For, Andy Crouch takes

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these commands and repackages them as a sense, as a way of thinking about human identity, who we are

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and what we are made for. He says this, every human person is a heart, soul, mind, strength,

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complex designed for love. It's who we are, it's how we are built, and it's what we were built for.

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So this Lent we are going to try to rediscover that central aspect of who we are. We're going to think

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about what stands in our way. We're going to consider how we can better reflect what we were

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made to be. So we start today with heart. I read from Isaiah chapter 44, and in my Bible the heading

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for that section is the absurdity of idol worship. And the prophet goes through this lengthy sort of

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imaginary scenario, but very realistic in which artisans, craftsmen are constructing an idol as a

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way to point out how ridiculous it is that the same materials that are used to cook bread and to warm

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his cold body are also used to make a god to worship. And Isaiah's conclusion is this, he feeds on

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ashes. A deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself, and he can't even say to

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himself, is not this thing in my right hand a fraud? In the Hebrew where it says deluded mind,

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it's actually a deluded heart. And when the Hebrew gets translated into the Greek, it's the same word

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heart, not mind. Modern translators have turned it into mind because maybe that helps us imagine

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what's going on here. But the problem for the artisan, the problem for the maker of an idol,

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is a deluded heart. Idolatry is the result of a deluded heart. Every now and then I like to take

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a peek at Eugene Peterson's paraphrase of scripture called The Message because it often adds a different

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flavor to a text and sometimes sharpens the edge as it does here. I want to share with you a portion

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of this passage from Peterson's The Message. Pretty stupid, wouldn't you say? Don't they have

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eyes in their heads? Are their brains working at all? Doesn't it occur to them to say, half of this

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tree I used for firewood, I baked bread, roasted meat, and enjoyed a good meal, and now I've used

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the rest to make a repulsive no-god. Here I am praying to a stick of wood. This lover of emptiness,

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of nothing, is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can't even look at what he's doing,

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can't even look at the no-god stick of wood in his hand and say, this is crazy.

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A deluded heart, Peterson translates as a lover of emptiness. I've never seen that phrase before,

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I'm a bit stuck on it. It's a captivating image, I think it is an excellent definition of idolatry,

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we're going to have to come back to it, but first I need to explain to you how we got so quickly

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from the subject of love, loving God with all of our heart, into idolatry.

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We're going to spend five weeks on the subject of love, so in order to do that without being

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repetitive, I'm going to have to narrow the focus a little bit, and when it comes to the heart,

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that's probably the one of these four elements that most naturally associates with love.

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We think of the heart when we think of love, so we've got to pull those apart just a little bit,

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we've got to get clear about what it means to love God with our whole heart, what sort of work

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is the heart doing that the mind and the body and the soul are not? Religion for us nowadays is often

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seen as a matter of the mind, we think about our belief system, our ideas, our ideologies, religion

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right? Our ideas, our ideologies, religion in that way is often in our minds akin to philosophy.

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This is a result of the Enlightenment, this is the modern world at work in us and around us,

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but before the Enlightenment, religion was not a matter of the mind, religion was a matter of the

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heart. It was Augustine who said, in the fourth century, you, God, have made us for yourself,

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and our heart is restless until it rests in you. The heart is the seat of the religious

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impulse in us, the heart is active, the heart is in motion, the heart is questioning, the heart is

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desiring, the heart is seeking. Later on in his book, The Confessions, Augustine will ask,

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what do I love when I love my God? For him, it's not enough to say that he loves God, he has to

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interrogate it further because there's more to it than that. It's not just a matter of mere

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internal devotion or piety, it's not just a narrow focus on my relationship with my God.

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It has sometimes become this in the life and the history of the Christian church and very often

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it has become this in order to set aside the demands on our mind and the thinking and it's

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been used to set aside the demands on the body, on our strength and our action. The heart is not

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just the place where our warm feelings reside, it's not just the the house of our affections.

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The heart breaks, the heart overflows, the heart moves and it cares, the heart closes,

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and it opens, the heart longs and it despairs, the heart commits and the heart gives. The heart is

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directional. This is what Augustine was getting at when he says, what do I love when I love my God?

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At what things or thing is my heart directed? The heart is something that is pointed in a particular

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direction. We point our hearts toward things that claim us, toward things that that capture us,

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that captivate us. We point our hearts toward things that suggest or promise fulfillment.

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We direct our hearts toward things that alleviate our pain or take away our guilt. We direct our

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hearts toward things that answer our deep needs, which brings us back to idolatry.

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John Calvin wrote in his Institutes, the human heart is a perpetual idle factory,

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a perpetual idle factory. That's the human heart. Idolatry is not a matter of what we do,

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it's not a matter of having the right or the wrong beliefs or philosophy or opinions or ideologies.

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That's not what idolatry is. Idolatry is a matter of the heart. Isaiah says he feeds on ashes a

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diluted heart has led him astray. This lover of emptiness, of nothing, is so out of touch with

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reality, so far gone that he can't even look at what he's doing, can't even look at the no-God stick

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of wood in his hand and say this is crazy. This lover of emptiness. Idolatry is the result of a

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misdirected heart, a heart that is pointed toward emptiness, a heart that feeds on ashes.

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So let's be clear, we are all lovers of emptiness, of empty things to some extent or another. We all

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feed on ashes and is that not why we are here? Because we have known emptiness and we have also

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known fullness and we'd like to have a little more of the one and a little bit less of the other.

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We've talked a bit about the decline in religion or religious activity affiliation commitment in the

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United States. There's been an interesting corollary to go along with religious decline in the United

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States. Studies have shown that as religious affiliation declines belief in non-traditional

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supernatural phenomena has gone up. For instance, roughly 30 percent of Americans today believe

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they have had contact with someone who has died. Nearly 20 percent, one in five believe they have

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been in the presence of a ghost. About one-third believe that ghosts exist and can interact with

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and harm the living and these numbers are not just a matter of the number of people who are

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and harm the living and these numbers are much higher than they were decades ago when religious

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affiliation was much more prevalent and people who do not attend church are twice as likely

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to believe in ghosts. The less religious people are the more likely they are to believe

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things about unfounded things about UFOs and about alien intelligent life monitoring human

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existence and governments covering these things up. People are turning in increasing numbers to

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astrology and other forms of divination and even psychedelics. My point is not to point to the

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world outside and say look at all of those idolaters out there who need to come in here. My point is to

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say look at all of the restlessness. Look at all of these restless hearts. Look at all of these who

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are searching for something and it's not just them it's us too. We also are restless. We also

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are searching. John Caputo writes the truth that is trying to become true in religion

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is the passionate search for the things we care most about the restlessness of our heart

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in the midst of a mysterious world. Caputo is very intentionally echoing Augustine our hearts

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are restless until they rest in God. I want to be careful that I don't suggest a simple

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idea that there is a God-shaped hole inside of us you might have heard this before that only God

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can fill. I think there's some truth to that but that's not what I'm meaning to say. That too easily

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becomes a conviction that we here have the answer the perfectly shaped thing to fit inside that hole

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that is in you. We don't have a hole you do and we can fill it for you because we have the answer

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with a capital A. That's not the right way to imagine what this restlessness means what this

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restlessness does to us and how it works on us. A better way to think about these restless hearts

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is not that there is a void that needs to be filled but that there is an overflow that needs

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to be directed that needs to be channeled. It's wrong to say that the world is full of empty hearts

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misguided as we might think they are. The world is not full of empty hearts it is full of people

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just like us who are tempted to give our hearts to empty things and to love God with all of our heart

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is to acknowledge this problem this temptation it's to name the emptiness that we have tried

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to love whatever that may be and to redirect our passionate search for the things we most care about

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so that it is no longer rooted in ashes but in something lasting something enduring something

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that is deeply real. To love God with all of our heart is not to love only one thing to the

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exclusion of all others it is to keep our hearts pointed in only one direction which allows all of

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our other loves to be properly ordered. We all know this about love that love has an endless or

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that the heart rather has an endless capacity to expand if you have fallen in love if you have had

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a child if you have experienced the depth of true friendship if you have brought a new pet into your

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family you know that the heart when you think it's going to burst it only finds new ways to expand

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but if our heart is ultimately misdirected if our heart is ultimately deluded what we get

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instead of expansion is a kind of division or fragmentation what we get is disquiet

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what we get is restlessness

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Jesus said this is the greatest highest command to love God with all of our heart

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we have all known and tried to love emptiness and we have known fullness we have fed on ashes and

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we have tasted the goodness of the Lord so let us carry on our passionate search

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search with renewed clarity about what is and is not worth our hearts

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because our hearts are restless our hearts are restless until they rest in God let us pray

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pray God take our restless hearts which we so easily give over to empty things

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and direct them toward you

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toward good and beautiful and lasting things eternal things in Christ's name we pray amen