NO MORE EXCUSES
I recently returned home from a trip to Tennessee, visiting family where I grew up. I spent the first 22 years of my life there. So many parts of the city are etched into my memory. Each time I go back, I notice the different changes. Some places that once felt alive are now empty and rundown. Like many cities, there are coffee shops and new restaurants that take over renovated buildings. Scattered throughout it all, which seems to be true in any place you go, there is more and more brokenness.
It’s the kind of brokenness that, if I’m honest, I try to ignore. As Dallas Willard once wrote, “One of the tricks we learn early in life is not to look, because if we look, we may feel a certain responsibility.” So we train ourselves not to look. Like when we were kids hiding under a blanket, thinking maybe if we can’t see it, it isn’t real. But the brokenness doesn’t disappear just because we close our eyes to it. It’s all around us. And if we’re honest, it’s in us too.
Right now, there are over 8.2 billion people alive on the planet. Think about the weight of your own story… the decisions, the pain, the challenges. Now multiply that by 8.2 billion. It’s overwhelming. My mind immediately asks the question, “How is anything ever going to change?”
I was reading a book this last week that described our cultural moment. Phrases were used like spiritual confusion, moral drift, cultural chaos. After laying out these issues we face, he goes on to offer what he thinks is the solution.
His answer: “Christians with burning hearts.”
Not louder Christians. Not more famous Christians. Not Christians with bigger platforms or better branding. Christians whose hearts are on fire.
The Danger of Appearance
One of the challenges we face in our social media age is the ability to appear on fire without actually being on fire. We can post all day about Jesus while our heart is dead and indifferent toward Him. Jesus confronted this in the religious leaders of His day when He said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
Let’s not get it twisted. Just because someone talks about Jesus with charisma doesn’t mean their private life looks anything like their message. One philosopher said, “If you really want to understand a man, don’t just listen to what he says, watch what he does.”
When the Flame Grows Cold
The Welsh preacher Christmas Evans once shared that, on his way to preach, he became convicted of a cold heart. He tethered his horse in the mountains and spent four hours in soul-searching prayer and met with God. The result was a powerful move of the Holy Spirit through his preaching.
God is deeply concerned with our hearts. Unchecked heart attitudes are what become the stepping stones to a leader’s downfall.
The question we all must face is, how do we respond when our heart grows cold? Do we continue on with business as usual?
How Do You Get a Heart That Burns?
In Luke 7, Jesus is invited to a Pharisee’s house for dinner. While He reclines at the table, a woman known as a sinner, probably a prostitute, walks in with an alabaster flask of expensive perfume. This was likely bought with money from her profession. She comes to anoint His head, but standing near Him, something breaks inside of her. She begins to weep. Her tears fall on His feet. She lets down her hair, which was a scandalous move in public in this culture, and begins to wipe His feet with it, kissing them in reverence. Then, she pours out her perfume and anoints His feet.
Simon, the host, begins speaking to himself. “If Jesus were really a prophet,” he thinks, “He’d know what kind of woman this is.” Jesus answers his internal conversation with a story: two people owe a debt. One owes fifty denarii, the other five hundred. Neither can pay. The lender cancels both debts. “Who loves more?” Jesus asks.
“The one who was forgiven more,” Simon answers.
Exactly.
Jesus tells Simon: You didn’t greet me with a kiss. You didn’t wash my feet. You didn’t anoint my head. But this woman, she hasn’t stopped with her extravagant devotion since she walked in. “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.”
Here’s the point I want to draw out: it wasn’t her devotion that earned forgiveness. It was her revelation of forgiveness that produced the extravagance. She didn’t earn anything. She received mercy, and mercy melted her. The parable makes it clear the debt being cleared had nothing to do with the behavior of the debtor. It was the generosity of the lender that wiped the slate clean. It was the generous acceptance of Jesus that caused the eruption of emotion for this woman.
She Had Seen Him Before
Chances are that this wasn’t the first time she had encountered Jesus. I imagine her somewhere in the crowd when He preached in Luke 6. “Blessed are the poor… Blessed are the hungry… Blessed are the rejected.” Something in His voice pierces her heart.
She must have seen Him touch the sick and those who were oppressed by demons, and with one touch they were liberated and made whole. Power was flowing out of Him and blessing the outcasts.
“If He blesses them… maybe He includes me too.”
When she hears He’s dining at Simon’s house, her burning heart had no other option but to find Him and serve Him where He was. And Jesus doesn’t push her away.
The Religious Ego vs. the Burning Heart
I have found that my heart grows dim when I become too confident in my own obedience. Subconsciously I treat Jesus like a supplement that I take periodically to make myself feel better. I want the perks of bearing the name “Christian” without bearing the weight of the cross. Everything becomes self-seeking rather than self-giving.
The truth of the matter is that a burning heart will do what the religious ego would never allow. A burning heart finds Jesus and gives itself to Him there. It listens to His words. It forgets its image. It doesn’t care who’s watching and has no need for recognition.
The burning heart is attentive to only one purpose: whatever Jesus is doing, that is where the attention goes.
The Scandal of the Gospel
Jesus knew exactly who this woman was, and that’s why He welcomed her. The scandal of the gospel is that it welcomes the broken, the sinful, the ashamed. Jesus once said to the religious elite, “The tax collectors and prostitutes enter the Kingdom before you.”
Why? Because they had no personal merit to hang their salvation on. They knew their need.
Richard Lovelace once wrote, “The shallowness of many people who are ‘saved’ may be due to the fact that they have never known themselves to be lost.”
We’ve made Jesus tame. We’ve domesticated the cross into a necklace, a sticker, an annual Easter message. But the real Jesus? He was, and still is, the most untamed figure to exist. At one point, His own family thought He was out of His mind. And He is… He’s out of His mind for us.
Phillip Yancey writes in his book The Jesus I Never Knew:
“Jesus, I found, bore little resemblance to the Mister Rogers figure I had met in Sunday School, and was remarkably unlike the person I had studied in Bible college. For one thing, He was far less tame.”
Jesus stopped Paul in his tracks, the man who was destroying the Church. What changed Paul’s heart? “The Son of God loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). That’s what melted him. That’s what gave him a burning heart. The chief of all sinners had a collision with the untamed Jesus.
It’s Not the Appearance of Fire We Need. Your Heart Can Burn.
I’ve seen the gospel melt 60-year-old men who spent years in prison. I’ve seen it free people from addiction, restore broken families, and turn the most insecure and fearful into bold evangelists.
And I’ve personally experienced it. At 22, busted, broken, sitting in rehab, Jesus didn’t push me away. His love melted me and gave me a burning heart.
And I’m telling you now, He won’t push you away either.
This isn’t about hype or emotionalism. It’s about bringing Jesus your whole heart. Not your résumé. Not your performance. Just your heart. And letting His love set it on fire.
The world doesn’t need the appearance of fire. It needs burning Christians who spread the untamed love of Jesus everywhere they go.
Today is a great day to get rid of any and all excuses that would try and tell you that you are too far out of reach for his love. Let his love ignite your heart.
I’ll end with a prayer from Mother Teresa:
“Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go. Flood my soul with your spirit and life. Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly that my life may only be a radiance of yours. Shine through me and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel your presence in my soul. Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus.”