"From Eden to Eden -- Exploring the Saga of Salvation History"

Part VI: Rebuilding a Broken Heart

Sermon by Pastor Dale Wolcott

February 10, 2001

(All scriptures are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted.)

Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 29:10-14 "For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I caused you to be carried away captive."

Most of us probably don't recall what was happening in our lives on April 20, 1999. But for the broken-hearted families, faculty and friends of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, it's a date that is permanently etched on memory's calendar. You do remember the Columbine massacre, don't you? Thirteen young lives snuffed out in minutes by two student gunmen who ended their rampage by turning their weapons on themselves. In fact, we remembered it this week, didn't we? Two similar high school bombing plots were uncovered this week -- one in Colorado, one in Kansas.

CNN news, reporting those stories, quoted a University of Colorado professor as saying: "All the evidence suggests that the violence crisis isn't over." [Del Eilliott, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, in AP story on CNN.com 2/9/01]

Of course he's right. A columnist in Time magazine's year-end issue, about 6 weeks ago, gives some hints as to why it isn't over, under the headline, "Stressed-out kids: Children and teens seem more anxious today than they were 50 years ago." It quotes a study published last fall in a professional psychology journal: "Normal children ages 9-17 exhibit a higher level of anxiety today than children who were treated for psychiatric disorders" in the 1950's. [Christine Gorman, Time, Dec. 25, 2000 / Jan. 1, 2001, p. 168]

Our world is filled, more and more, with broken-hearted people. And the brokenness seems to start earlier and run deeper than ever before.

So what does God's Word have to tell us about rebuilding a broken heart? I want to share two stories with you this morning. One is a story from Littleton. The other is from the book of Jeremiah. We'll start with the Bible, and before we open it, let's pray:

Father, You are the Healer of broken hearts. I pray for your Spirit to use Your Word to touch us and heal us this morning. Speak Lord, for we are listening, in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Open to Jeremiah 4. While you're finding it, let's review where we are in our ten-part series, "Eden to Eden: The Saga of Salvation History." We began at the beginning, with a beautiful Creation which God has promised will someday be restored, but we also discovered that the Bible tells a story behind all the Bible stories -- a story of a war in heaven, a rebel angel who appears in that beautiful Garden of Eden and like a pied piper leads the world into rebellion against God's eternal Law of Love. And the brokenness begins.

But at the very gates of Eden there was a promise of a Savior who would bruise the serpent's head someday. The promise was repeated in Noah's rainbow, and again to Abraham when the ram in the thicket took Isaac's place on the altar.

Later God led Abraham's family out of slavery in Egypt, and on their way to the promised land gave them a sanctuary, a model of His heavenly home, a place where He would dwell among them. In that sanctuary, at the center of the Most Holy Place, was a golden chest known as the "ark of the covenant," representing the throne of God in heaven. On special occasions God revealed His visible presence there. So the ark was the seat of God's government, so to speak. And what was inside the ark? Yes, the Ten Commandments, the foundation of God's government -- the constitution of heaven if you will -- His holy law, the very same Law of Love that had been trampled in Eden.

Sometimes those two stone tablets were called the Ten Words, or the Ten Commands. But sometimes -- very often in Old Testament -- they are simply called "the covenant." This was the basis of God's agreement or covenant with His people. It spelled out the conditions on which God and people (God and anybody anywhere in His universe!) can stay in fellowship, in close relationship with each other.

And in the worship services held daily and yearly at the sanctuary, the sacrifice of innocent lambs reminded the people constantly that there was a Savior to come, Someone who would die to pay the price for their breaking of the covenant, to buy back the lost inheritance of Eden, to open a path back to God, back into the throne room of the Creator.

Now as we come to Jeremiah several hundred years have passed. God's people have settled into the promised land. Solomon has built a permanent temple in Jerusalem to replace the tent-sanctuary erected by Moses at Mt. Sinai. There's been a lot of water under the bridge, a lot of ups and downs for God's people -- more downs than ups, if you read the story.

But all through those years the Ark of the Covenant had rested in the Most Holy Place. And all thru those years, the priesthood established by Moses and Aaron had carried on the worship services, twice a day offering the lamb.

And then once each year, on the annual day of Judgment (Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement), the High Priest would make the solemn pilgrimage into the throne room -- into the very presence of the Ark of the Covenant -- pre-enacting the promise that someday God and His people will be at one again, that someday Eden will be restored.

But somehow it wasn't working. This young man by the name of Jeremiah was one of the priests. He grew up around the Temple. He knew about the Covenant, he loved the God of the Covenant, he understood the promise of the Covenant. But he could see, young as he was, that his people had abandoned their covenant with God.

The Israelite nation of Jeremiah's day at the turn of the 6th Century BC was in the late stages of a moral and spiritual decay that had already eaten the nation's heart out and left it on the very verge of total collapse. Jeremiah lived in the "time of the end" of the nation of Judah.

He was the prophet of the Babylonian Captivity. He has become known as the "weeping prophet," the prophet of the broken heart. Note chapter 4, verse19 and the first part of verse 20, "O my soul, my soul! I am pained in my very heart! My heart makes a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Destruction upon destruction is cried, for the whole land is plundered." You'll find passages like this sprinkled all through Jeremiah's 2 Bible books (Jeremiah and Lamentations).

Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem before, during and after the three successive attacks by the Babylonians spread out over a period of several years. He lived the horror of it all; he shared the heartbreak of his people. And as he spoke God's word to the people he put his finger on the reason for the tragedy: note verses 17 and 18, "Like keepers of a field they [i.e., the Babylonians] are against her all around," and why? "Because she has been rebellious against Me, says the Lord. Your ways and your doings have procured these things for you. This is your wickedness, because it is bitter, because it reaches to your" -- note carefully, to your what? -- "to your heart."

Christmastime, 1996, Littleton, Colorado. Two and a half years before the Columbine tragedy.

Brad & Misty Bernall were the brokenhearted parents of a 15-yr-old girl who seemed to fit Jeremiah's description of rebellious Israel. Just a few days earlier, Misty had found a stack of letters from their daughter Cassie's closest girlfriend which made it clear that Cassie was in deep, deep trouble.

They'd seen it coming for a couple of years. The music, the clothes, the attitude, the D's & F's on the report cards, the increasingly frequent clashes between mother and teenager.

But now Misty and Brad held in their hands a stack of handwritten death-wishes, illustrated with gruesome Satanic symbols, and including specific advice from Cassie's girlfriend on how Cassie could go about killing her own parents. For the next several months Brad & Misty's hearts were numb as they did what they could to drag their daughter back from the edge of a precipice from which she seemed bent on jumping.

They reported the death threats to the sheriff. They got a restraining order against the Satanist girlfriend. They moved Cassie to a Christian school. They met with the youth pastor of their church, and he told them later, "When I first met Cassie I thought she was gone, unreachable. I thought there was no way she would ever recover from what she was doing."

Brad & Misty felt the way Jeremiah must have felt about God's people back in the days of the Babylonian invasion. Note chapter 3, verse 21, "A voice was heard on the desolate heights, weeping and supplications of the children of Israel. For they have perverted their way; they have forgotten the Lord their God."

It seemed hopeless to Jeremiah as it did for Cassie Bernall's parents. But note verse 22: "Return, you backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings." No matter how dark things seemed, Jeremiah wasn't willing to give up, and neither were Brad and Misty.

And this morning if you feel that numb emptiness of a broken heart, for whatever reason -- the first thing God's Word says to you is: Don't give up! The Good News of this book -- the good news of this Saga of Salvation History -- is that there is hope for broken hearts!

In the next few minutes I want to share with you a blueprint for rebuilding a broken heart, given to us by Jeremiah, the prophet of the broken heart. We're going to spend a little time with the worksheet now: "How to Have a Whole Heart -- the Gospel According to Jeremiah." Notice 2 words in bold letters in each of the first 3 Scriptures: What are they? They are, "heart" and "covenant." The way God makes our hearts whole again has something to do with that covenant, and the covenant has something to do with those Ten Commandments.

However, the covenant is not the Ten Commandments. The covenant is an agreement between God and His people about how they are going to relate to each other. The covenant is a commitment to a relationship. The problem you find all through the history of the Israelite nation in the Old Testament was that they would promise time after time after time to keep the covenant -- and then they would backslide. They didn't seem to have what it takes to stick with it. Again and again God compared Himself to a brokenhearted lover, and the Israelite people to an adulterous wife: He had entered into a marriage covenant with His bride, and they kept violating the relationship. (Example: Jeremiah 3:20.)

And -- get this -- because their relationship with God was broken, their relationships with the people around them were broken too. The first half of the Ten Commandments is about our relationship with God, but the second half is about our human interrelationships. Often our broken heartedness comes from our human relationships, as it did for Brad and Misty. But God knows we can only get those horizontal relationships right if we first get the vertical relationship right.

Looking at our worksheets: "You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart." (Jer. 29:13) "With continual weeping they shall come, and seek the Lord their God..., saying, Come and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that will not be forgotten." (50:4, 5)

Weeping leads to seeking. Have you noticed that? Weeping leads to seeking.

The other evening Nancy and I visited with Ruth in her beautiful 100-year-old farm house out on Homer Road. Most of you know Ruth; she'll be 84 this year. She shared with us how she and her husband came back to the Lord many years ago when their children were small. They had a little boy named Tommy and when Tommy drowned, Ruth told us, "That's what got us into church." Weeping leads to seeking. And when we search with all our heart, what we want is a perpetual covenant that won't be forgotten. (Ruth's been in church ever since; she's here with us today -- a wonderful example of God's power to rebuild a broken heart permanently!)

Further down on our worksheet, here's a promise: "I will give them one heart and one way.... And I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from doing them good;... [and] that they will not depart from Me." (32:39, 40) If you can have a stable, steadfast, intimate personal relationship with God, He'll heal your heart. It's kind of like setting a broken bone: you can't wear your cast one day, then take it off the next day. It's got to be for the duration.

Back to the worksheet: Let's turn to Jeremiah 31. This is probably the most important chapter in Jeremiah. Verses 31-34 are quoted word-for-word in the New Testament (Hebrews chapter 8) -- the longest Old Testament quote you'll find anywhere in the New Testament. Let's read through this together, reading 31-33, "Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah -- not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people."

And how do you get God's law written on your heart? Note the last bullet on your worksheet. Jeremiah 33:14, "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will perform that good thing which I have PROMISED..." The old covenant, the one that doesn't work, is based on my promises to try to do my best to keep God's commandments. I'll blow it every time. The new covenant, the one that works, the everlasting one, the one that will rebuild my broken heart, is based on God's promises. All I can do is trust HIM.

Now, what does He promise? "I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; a King shall reign and prosper [that's Jesus!].... Now this is His name by which He will be called: The Lord Our Righteousness." (23:6)

Everything in God's great plan to restore this planet, to get us back to Eden, to rebuild our broken hearts, is centered in Jesus. His heart was broken so yours could be whole. When you believe the story of His amazing love, it will grab your heart, and your healing will begin. That's how it worked for Jeremiah. Turn to chapter 15:16, "Your words were found, and I ate them, and Your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart; for I am called by Your name, O Lord God of hosts."

Jeremiah believed the Word, believed the promise. He put his trust in the One to come, the Word made flesh, Jesus. Jeremiah wasn't through with weeping, but his heart was whole.

That's how the new covenant works.

How did it work for Cassie?

When Brad and Misty Bernall discovered that their daughter was indulging serious fantasies about killing her parents, it broke their hearts. And of course what they began to realize was that Cassie's heart was very broken too, in a different sort of way. Later Cassie wrote about those days and said, "I hurt so bad that I would just go in the bathroom and bang my head against the counter. I had given myself to Satan, and I wanted to kill myself but I was too scared to do it." When her parents pulled her out of public high school and sent her to a Christian school, she threw a violent tantrum and vowed she'd hate every minute of it.

But in the first few days, she met a friend who was willing to accept her just the way she was. Jamie listened; and eventually, because Jamie listened to Cassie, Cassie started listening to Jamie. Later Cassie herself recounted the story: "Jamie told me very gently, and [inoffensively] . . . about Christ, and how what had happened to me was not God's fault. He might have allowed it to happen, she said, but ultimately I had brought it upon myself. We are given a free will, Jamie told me, and I had chosen to make decisions I would later regret. I found truth in her words and began to listen."

Jamie invited Cassie on church-sponsored weekend youth retreat, and that weekend a miracle happened. Cassie found a new-covenant relationship with Jesus. You need to read the book to get the whole story. Cassie did some serious crying that weekend, but her dad remembers it this way: "When she left [to go on the retreat] she had still been this gloomy, head-down, say-nothing girl. But . . . the day she came back [from the retreat] she was bouncy and excited about what had happened to her. It was as if she had been in a dark room, and somebody had turned the light on, so she could again see the beauty around her."

Her parents hardly expected this new relationship (new covenant) to last, but it did. Cassie knew that Jesus had set her free from what Satan had been doing in her life, and she was not about to let go of Him! She got into Bible study, with her youth group and on her own. She wondered what it would be like to maybe be a missionary when she finished school. She started making new friends -- including her mom. But what people noticed most was that she started smiling again!

On the morning of April 20, 1999, about 2 years after she'd met Jesus, Cassie Bernall walked into Columbine High School and, as she often did, handed a note to her friend Amanda. At the bottom of the note it said, "P.S. Honestly, I want to live completely for God. It's hard and scary, but totally worth it."

At around 11:30 that morning Cassie was in the library doing an assignment when the gunfire began. Later, a friend who escaped from the library after hiding under a table said he heard the guys with the gun asking somebody, "Do you believe in God?" And then he heard Cassie's voice. "It wasn't shaky," he said, "it was strong." She said, "Yes." And then a gunshot, and Cassie's life was over. [Misty Bernall, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. Farmington, PA: Plough Pub. House, 1999.]

Cassie Bernall died with her whole heart. Jesus had rebuilt it.

As we wrap up, I'd like to ask the ushers to please distribute a little response card. While they're doing that, let me tell you the end of Jeremiah's story. His is a bit like Cassie's, only longer. It definitely does not have a Pollyanna ending. Jeremiah spent time in a dungeon. He endured the starvation of the final siege of Jerusalem along with everybody else. Jeremiah recorded in his book a very specific promise from God that after 70 years the 

Babylonian captives would return (29:10), but he never saw much evidence in his lifetime that the promise would ever come true. He eventually died in exile, down in Egypt with a group of rebellious Israelites who continued to ignored his prophesying, which is basically what it seemed the whole nation had done all through his years of ministry. No wonder he was the weeping prophet!

But even though Jeremiah couldn't see the evidence that God was working -- God was working. After 70 years, Cyrus sent the Jews back. The Temple was rebuilt; the nation was restored.

Daniel in Babylon studied and studied the scrolls of Jeremiah about those 70 years, and then the angel Gabriel came to him (Daniel 9) and said, There are going to be seven more 70's -- 490 years -- and then the Messiah, the promised Prince, will come." And Jesus did come, exactly on time. And when He came, He died, but He rose again, and before He returned to His Father He promised He would come again. And He will!

Our final four messages in this series are going to tell the rest of the story. Because of what Jesus has done through Jeremiah's tears, and through Brad's and Misty's, and through Cassie's tears -- because of what Jesus has done and is doing and has promised to do through your tears, through the brokenness of your heart, you can be confident your heart will be whole again. That is Good News!

I have a song I'd like to share as we close this morning. As I sing, please read through the response card. Please pray about your response to God's Word, then mark whatever there is on this card that matches what is in your heart. Hand it to usher as you are dismissed following the service, or directly to me at the door if you prefer.