March 28, 2008
After completing a week and a half long mission project overseas, the team I was leading gathered with four other teams for a few days’ worth of sightseeing. In the daytime, we would doggedly take our teams to all the historically important places we could, hoping to maximize the opportunity for each person. Then, in the evening, while our team members were all relaxing and socializing with their friends, the other team leaders and I (all college campus ministers at the time) often played the card game “Hearts” (NOT a gambling game in case you wondered).
Anyway, while there wasn’t any intended spiritual significance to the game itself, in retrospect it could perhaps be an interesting anti-metaphor for our spiritual mission as Christians (at least in a very broad sense). And just what is an “anti-metaphor?” Don’t bother to look it up in the dictionary: I like to make up words occasionally. An “anti-metaphor” would be something symbolizing the opposite of an ideal – in other words, the concept it represents is the very farthest one can be from what one is really trying to discuss. Hopefully, the contrast helps one to understand the idea being engaged.
With that in mind, consider the object of the game of Hearts: to NOT take points. Points are represented by the suit of hearts (hence, the name of the game): the more hearts you capture, the more points you earn, and the player who has the most points at the end of the game is the loser. One card in the game, the queen of spades, is worth thirteen points all by itself. Capturing THAT card is definitely NOT optimal.
In contrast, God is all about capturing hearts. In fact, the theme of the Christian life is that God has captured a person’s heart and then through him or her is reaching even more hearts. A Christian’s mission, therefore, is to allow the Lord to work His will through him or her by participating in God’s mission to capture the hearts of others.
Consider the woman who was perhaps the very first person in Europe converted to Christianity (she is at least the first person recorded as having converted). Luke, in the book of Acts, shares an eyewitness account.
“On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate (of Philippi) to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul (the Apostle)’s message (of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ). When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. ‘If you consider me a Believer in the Lord,’ she said, ‘come and stay at my house.’ And she persuaded us” (Acts 16:13-15 NIV).
It is a very profound truth revealed to us here: that the Lord opened her heart. And when He opened her heart, He moved in and began to make His residence there, making her life in turn a vehicle for advancing His mission of saving lives from the power and penalty of sin. Her heart was captured by the Lord’s love, and then her household was also captured. And because her house was also now God’s, He had a vantage point from which He could use His servants, Paul and Silas, to take His Gospel to the entire city of Philippi. From there, the power of God through Paul and Silas delivered spiritual freedom to a slave girl who was under the power of evil spirits, and then, though spiritual opposition had begun to grow and rally against them, that same freedom came into the life of a Philippian jailer, and from there into the members of his household as well.
God is involved in His own version of Hearts today. But it isn’t a game. He is in deadly earnest. The Lord is passionately pursuing the full and absolute surrender of your Heart into His safekeeping, because His capture of your heart allows your heart to be fully free. And God isn’t satisfied with only securing your heart: He is seeking to bring His salvation to each and every one that will yield to His grace today. Because our God is “on mission” to seek and save those who are lost (see Luke 19:11), it is to this mission that He has invited His children to join Him.
It is this amazing love that motivated the team members with whom I worked on that particular mission trip. God had blessed them and He had blessed me: we therefore earnestly and urgently sought ways to meaningfully share His blessings with others. From light construction work to sports camps for teens, we reached every heart that we could. From recreational programs for children living in camps to simply sharing the Gospel story with both residents and travelers with whom we came into contact, we poured God’s love into each heart that He opened to us.
Is He opening your heart today to His love? Have you fully surrendered to Him and permitted His gracious power to begin the transformation that your heart needs? If so, is your life sufficiently available to Him to motivate your joining Him on mission? Are you willing to open your life to His leading and your home to His power, so that He can engage others around you with this same love? If not, why not? If you have been made His child, let Him begin to work through you so that what He has poured INTO your life may be generously poured THROUGH your life into the lives of others. Look for ways in your church to participate in God’s efforts to bring His salvation into the hearts of those around you.
Again, God is seeking to capture Hearts, but He isn’t playing games. So don’t waste your life by withholding from Him the vantage point His grace might have in you for others.
(Thom Mollohan and his family have ministered in southern Ohio the past twelve and half years and is the author of The Fairy Tale Parables: Classic Fairy Tales Pointing to God's Love and Truth and may be reached for comments or questions by email at pastorthom@pathwaygallipolis.com).
