The Heartbeat of Christianity

  The human heart is an amazing thing.  I have almost no idea how it works, although I am very grateful that it does.  Mine beats roughly 60 times a minute (or 90, if it's the bottom half of the 9th inning), meaning that in an hour it beats 3600 times.  That's over 86,000 times a day, over 2,500,000 a month, and over 31,000,000 beats in a year.  You can add a few onto that if you have to drive in Atlanta traffic more than once a month.

  Over 31 million times a month, your heart beats, drawing blood to itself from the extremities of the body, and sending blood back out, to the brain and the liver and the fingers and the toes.  It repeats this simple activity, and in so doing, sustains life.

  When the human heart fails to function properly, it can mean anything from lifestyle modifications to death.  Incredible surgeries can now be performed, even on infants, to correct malfunctions in the heart.  Many things can go wrong with the heart, and it's amazing that not more do.  Most of these malfunctions mean that the heart ceases to balance the amount of blood the heart pulls in with the amount of blood the heart sends out.

  And, in many ways, the church needs to have the same balance, or our malfunctions threaten seriously to impair our witness as Christ's hands and feet here on earth.  While I am not prepared to say that our sin might endanger the existence of Christ's church, it can imperil its witness.  The church needs the same balance as the heart--it sends to send out disciples just as surely as it gathers them to itself.

  What does this mean?

  The first half of the equation, the bringing in, refers to the importance of our fellowship, of our worship.  We gather together to grow in faith.  We gather to witness to the Holy Spirit's work in our lives, and to wait on the Spirit's guidance.  We gather to be led, to sing God's praises, and to be strengthened.

  Having gathered together, we are sent out into the world to witness to God's grace, to proclaim his name.  It's vital that the church be a sending point as well as a gathering point--we can't simply try to hoard God's grace, to enjoy his gifts while never bothering to share them with the world.  From the beginning of time God has been freely sharing his gifts with the world--we need to follow his model and freely share our gifts with the world.  We can't simply sit back and look forward to eternity.  We're called to join in with what God is doing in the world, not just in the church.  We can't become imbalanced and only gather to worship.  We have to go forth to witness, to proclaim.

  We have to be sent, to send, just as much as we gather and are gathered.  May our hearts beat for Christ, and may he lead us boldly forward.