Follow God's Heart

The message given in the Sunday night worship service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church.  The Bible verses used are Mark 14:32-41.

            One of the things you’ll hear people say, one of the pieces of advice people give, is that you should always “follow your heart”.  Have you ever heard that?  “Follow your heart.”  Listen to that inner voice inside you.  It’ll tell you what you need to do.

            Now, there are times when that’s good advice.  But there are times when it’s not, too.  I mean, I don’t know about you, but there are times when my heart is not very reliable.  There are times when my heart tells me to watch the ball game when I know I really should be going to visit someone.  There are times when my heart tells me to go have a big bowl of ice cream when I know I need to watch my weight.  There are times when my heart tells me to go buy something I cannot afford when I know my checkbook is telling me not to.  In other words, there are plenty of times when following my heart could get me into a lot of trouble.

            It’s not always bad to follow your heart.  But if we’re going to follow our hearts, we’d better make sure our heart is in line with God’s heart.  Because it’s God’s heart that we really need to follow, not our own.  I think that’s one of the many things our Bible reading for today shows us.

            Jesus and the disciples have just had what we now call the Last Supper.  They’ve left the Upper Room.  They go to Gethsemane.  It’s interesting, to me at least, that we always refer to this as “the Garden of Gethsemane”, but the Bible never uses that phrase.  Mark and Matthew just say that they went to “a place called Gethsemane”.  John says they went to a garden, but does not give the garden a name.  Luke says they went to the Mount of Olives--from what I read, Gethsemane is at the foot of the Mount of Olives.

            Anyway, they go there.  Jesus tells most of the disciples to sit and wait.  He takes Peter, James, and John with him, and they go a ways farther.  Then He tells them to stay and keep watch.  Jesus goes on a little farther and prays.

            Listen to what Jesus prays.  We’re told that He “fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him.”  He says, “Abba, father, everything is possible for you.  Take this cup from me.”

            Jesus knew what was coming.  He knew that the authorities were coming to arrest Him and kill Him.  He had told the disciples many times this was going to happen.  In fact, He’d just told them that again, in the Upper Room at the Last Supper.

            But now, the moment had actually come.  It was time for Jesus to face it.  And when He did--He looked for a way to get out of it.  He wanted desperately to avoid what was coming.  He was praying with all His might for God to somehow, some way, take Him out of this situation.  Luke tells us that Jesus prayed so hard that He was sweating, and that His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.

            This is why I say that “follow your heart” is not always good advice.  Because if Jesus had followed His heart at that moment, He’d have run away, right?  He’d have gotten out of Dodge as fast as he could.  His heart was saying, “I don’t want to do this.  There’s got to be some other way.  God the Father can do something else to save human beings.  After all, he’s God the Father.  Everything is possible for Him.  There has to be some other way this can work.  I don’t want to suffer and die.  I want to get out of here.”

            It’s pretty understandable, right?  I mean, yes, Jesus was the divine Son of God, but He was also fully human.  And as such, He had all the same feelings and fears that you and I have.  Jesus did not want to die.  He especially did not want to die in an incredibly cruel, painful way.  Who would?  Would you?

            When I think about that part of Jesus’ prayer, it sounds a lot like prayers I’ve prayed at times.  Not that I’ve ever thought I was going to die, I don’t mean that.  But there are times where I was faced with a situation, and I knew I was supposed to go through with it, but going through with it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.  Have you ever had a time like that?  I would think some of you must have.  A time where you knew what you should do, knew what you were supposed to do, but it was the last thing you wanted to do.

            When that happens to us, our heart tells us to avoid the situation.  Either run away, or quit, or give in, or do something different, or something.  Find a way to get out of it.  Never mind what we may be “supposed” to do.  Follow your heart and get out of there.

            And so we pray.  We pray for God to show us the way out.  We pray for God to do something that somehow, in some way, will allow us to follow our heart and avoid doing what we know we should do.

            When you’ve done that, what’s happened?  Did it work?  It never has for me.  In fact, the times I’ve prayed that way have really been the times when I felt farthest away from God.  I would pray and pray, and it felt like my prayers were just hitting the ceiling and bouncing back from me.  It felt like God was not there at all, or if God was there God was ignoring me.

            That was not true, of course.  God was there.  God was not ignoring me.  God was answering my prayer.  I just did not want to hear the answer, because the answer was no.  God was telling me that God was not going to take me out of the situation.  God did not want me to follow my heart.  God wanted me to follow His heart.  And God’s heart was for me to face up to the situation and do what I knew I should do, what God wanted me to do.

            That’s pretty much how it worked for Jesus, too.  Jesus was praying for God to show him a way out.  Jesus wanted God to allow Him to follow His own heart.  Three times, Jesus prayed that way.  And God gave him an answer.  But the answer was no.  This was what Jesus had been sent to earth for in the first place--to die, to take the punishment for our sins that should go to us.  God the Father was not going to take him out of that situation.  God the Father wanted Jesus to follow God’s heart.

            And of course, Jesus did.  Some of you are ahead of me on that.  You know the last line of Jesus’ prayer, the line I left out earlier.  The last line of Jesus’ prayer is “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

            Jesus knew what His heart was telling him.  But He knew that what His heart was telling Him was not the most important thing.  The most important thing was for Jesus to follow God’s heart.  And He did.  Even when it was not what Jesus wanted to do--even when it may have been the last thing in the world Jesus wanted to do--he still did it.  Even when He knew it would cost Him His life on earth, he still did it.  Jesus followed God’s heart all the way, all the way to death on a cross.

            The Bible does not tell us this next part.  But I suspect, when Jesus said that last line--”Yet not what I will, but what you will”--he felt as close to God the Father as he ever had while he was on earth.  The reason I think that is because that’s how it works for me.  Any time I stop praying for God to do what I want God to do, and instead pray that God’s will be done, that’s when I feel God’s presence with me the most.  

That, more than any other time, is when I feel God with me.  When I stop trying to tell God what to do, when I stop telling God to take me out of hard situations, and instead just ask God to help me do His will.  When I stop listening to my own heart, and start following God’s heart.  It does not mean things always go smooth and easy.  For Jesus, doing God’s will meant things went about as hard for Him as they could possibly go.  But even though things were very hard, He knew that God the Father was with Him.  And when you and I do God’s will, we will know that God the Father is with us, too.

            God asks us to do some hard things sometimes.  We don’t want to do them.  Our heart tells us there must be some other way.  We pray, as Jesus did, God, everything is possible for you.  Take this away from me.

            But God never promised to keep hard things away from us.  But God does promise to be with us through the hard things.  If we do what Jesus did, if we follow the heart of God the Father, we will feel God keeping God’s promise.  We will know that God is with us.  And with God’s help, we’ll be able to face anything we need to face.