If I Only Had a Heart
So Dorothy and the brainless Scarecrow are going along to meet the Wizard of Oz, and get what they needed. The next character that we meet is the Tin Man.
The Tin Man has rusted over. He got caught in a rainstorm when they finally oil him up so that he can speak and move again, he tells them well, he doesn't have a heart, and so he joins them to hopefully go off to the Wizard and find a heart.
The Danger of Heartless Religion
There are a lot of heartless people in the world. Even some of them claim to be Christian, but they have no compassion. They have no care. They seem to enjoy lambasting and judging people, rather than offering them grace and pointing them towards a loving God who wants to save them.
There's a sense in which the Pharisees were the “tin men” of the New Testament. No heart! They had all the activity, right, they did all the churchy things, but Jesus essentially was against them because they didn't have a heart! They did all they did without the heart of worship in the heart of love.
I think this can be an easy trap for us Christians to fall into. We get so caught up in churchy things and we forget that it's actually all about the heart.
Words Without Heart Are Empty
I watched a video the other day of John Piper reading a prayer that he had asked ChatGPT to compose. It was a beautiful prayer! And I've also used ChatGPT to help me rephrase things sometimes and come up with things like that.
But what he said was interesting. He said, this is not prayer because there's no heart. It's just a machine giving us words. And that's exactly what the Pharisees were like. They were wordy, but they had no heart.
God is not looking for wordy Christians who honour Him with their lips, but who are tin men walking around without a heart.
Ask Jesus for a New Heart
Today, my friends, let your heart be captured by Jesus. Ask Him today to give you a loving and full and worshipful heart.
Perhaps you do have a heart, but it's hard and it's bitter, and it's angry and it's sinful! And you need to come and ask for a new heart and say, “please forgive me for these things and the way I've messed up my heart. And Lord, give me a new heart that loves, that worships, that isn't selfish.”
The Tin Man found out at the end of the movie that he, in a sense, had a heart the whole time. I think all of us need our hearts to be redeemed, to be cleansed, to be made new by Christ.
So come to Him today, perhaps like the Tin Man, and ask Him for a heart like Jesus' heart. May it be that wherever you go today, people sense not just a Christian who has the brain and the knowledge and the words, but a Christian who's heart and soul, out for Christ.
