Readings for June 21

This Sunday we'll be considering Paul's very heartfelt appeal to the Corinthians to respond to his sacrificial and open-hearted ministry to them with the same urgency and open-heartedness.
This matter of our hearts and their relative hardness has been a recurring theme in the hymns we've been singing at North Chittenden over the past year or so. I think we talk as much as any group of earnest believers about the importance of having hearts that are soft toward God and his people.
But even so, preoccupied with the condition of our hearts or not, it is hard to know how to measure the hardness of our hearts and even harder to observe our own hearts hardening. And our hearts do harden - by sneaky slight degrees or in great cynical bounds.
A heart made soft is vulnerable and risky. A soft heart looks like a soldier on the field of battle without any armor, without any weapons.
A hard heart does not risk and is not easily wounded. A hard heart misses the pain, dismay, and injury of the soft heart, but it also misses the point. Hardening your heart to protect it is like caging a dove for its protection: to the extent that you succeed you do so at the expense of the heart's very "heartness."



Call to Repentance
John 15:1-2 (page 1676)

Call to Worship
Psalm 95 (page 933)

OT Reading
Isaiah 49:8-18 (page 1138)

NT Reading
Hebrews 3:7-19 (page 1865)

Message
The Sadness of a Hardened Heart
2 Corinthians 6:1-13 (page 1799)