Sunday message · The Heart Matters series
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Message Summary
In the fifth week of The Heart Matters, a Lent-inspired series, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Psalm 139:23–24. He opens with a made-up story of a young man who keeps trying to cut in line at a grocery store’s seniors-only hour, only to reveal that he needs to unlock the doors. Plot twists disrupt what we think we already know, and Jesus used them often, as when he called the poor, the mourning and the meek blessed in a culture that linked happiness with wealth, health and strength. We enjoy plot twists in stories, but not in our own lives.
This week the series turns from our relationship with God to how our sin affects our relationships with others. That calls for praying as David did, asking God to search and test him and see if there is any offensive way in him.
Phil admits he dreads airport body scanners, not because he is hiding anything, but because they might find something he did not think was wrong. As a teenager, he once had to throw away a climbing carabiner he used as a key chain. Inviting God to search us means asking him to reveal thoughts and actions we consider justified that actually break his standards and offend his heart. It is inviting a plot twist.
We pray this way because God cares about our hearts toward others. Jesus named loving God the greatest commandment and loving our neighbor the second (Mark 12:28–31), yet our assumptions about what love looks like can blind us. James warns that favoritism is sin (James 2:8–9). His readers were giving the rich better seats than the poor. Biblical favoritism, Phil explains, means judging others by selfish personal criteria rather than seeing them as God sees them. Personality and past hurts are no excuse. Quoting Timothy Lane’s book How People Change, he notes that we were made for community, yet since the fall we run from the very friendships we need.
God searches our hearts in two ways. First, it takes a willing heart, because “God will not reveal what we conceal.” He is not playing hide and seek; he wants to perform surgery. Second, he works through relationships. Drawing on the book It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian, Phil says real change happens in covenant community, where others may confront our selfishness, our prejudices or ideals shaped more by culture than by the gospel. The depth of our love for others reflects the depth of our relationship with God, and if the gospel has not felt like good news lately, maybe we have not let God reveal any bad news about us.
Since God showed his love by sending his Son to die for us while we were still sinners, Phil asks why we would not pray this way. Though the church is not together physically, he invites everyone during a time of worship to ask God to search and test them, and to measure their hearts toward others by the gospel rather than by culture or past experience.