Why My Heart Wouldn’t Burn

On worship, self-centered hope, and what it takes to make much of Jesus.

Scripture: Luke 24:13-35 · Adapted from a sermon preached October 23, 2022.

A few years ago I sat in a room full of people worshiping, and my heart would not burn. I had come to a worship conference expecting to be lifted, and instead I felt like the only cold thing in a warm room. All around me people were swaying, weeping, some laughing out loud, hands raised, faces wet. And I stood there, arms at my sides, watching. I drove back to the hotel that night defeated. The music had been good and familiar. The teaching had been strong. And still nothing in me had reached for Jesus. So I asked myself the most honest question I had asked in a long time. Why does not my heart burn within me?

It was more than disappointing. It was horrifying. The Jesus I say I love and adore, the one I had given my life to serve, and there was nothing in me that night that longed for him. I am a Christian. I am a minister. And I could not worship. It would have been easy to blame the room, or the style, or the volume. But the ache underneath was not about preference. It was about me.

Maybe you know the feeling from smaller things. You walk into a restaurant everyone raved about, you order the very thing they told you to get, and it tastes like nothing they promised. One of my daughters did this at a family breakfast. She saw what looked like perfect slices of French toast lined up in a pan, drowned them in syrup, took a big bite, and discovered they were fried scrapple. It grossed her out. So she turned to her little sister and asked, sweetly, do you want my French toast? She took the thing she did not like, packaged it up nicely, and handed it off. We do that with worship sometimes. We keep the forms and pass the disappointment along as if it were the real thing, and we never stop to ask what actually went wrong in us.

The good news is that I am not the first person to stand near Jesus and feel nothing. Two of his own did it on a road. Luke tucks the story between the resurrection and the moment Jesus appears to the eleven, and we call it the road to Emmaus. Two men are walking home the afternoon of the resurrection, talking over everything that had happened, grieving. By verse 21 you can hear that they have lost hope: we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. They had a picture of how it was all supposed to go, and when it did not go that way, they were empty. Then Jesus himself comes near and walks with them. And they do not recognize him.

Then Jesus says something no pastor would dare say from a stage. He calls them foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe. Foolish means lacking judgment. Slow of heart means hard to persuade. And they had earned both. The women of their group had already come back with a physical testimony, the tomb is empty, and a spiritual one, angels who said he is alive. But when the men went to check, listen to what they report in verse 24: the body was gone, just as the women had said. That is all. The stone was rolled away, but no angels, no word that Jesus lives. Their report stopped at what they could see. They were leaning on themselves.

So Jesus walks them through their own Bible. Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. Notice the aim of that roadside Bible study. He was not handing them a technique or a better mood. He was pointing them to himself. That is the whole difference. These two men were not living a Christ-centered life. They had fallen into the oldest trap there is, the same one I fell into at that conference, a self-centered hope. A hope built on how I wanted the day to go, how I expected to feel, what I had come to get.

Here is the question that undid me, and I think it is worth sitting with. Is it possible to be in the presence of Christ and not recognize him? I believe it is. I believe a person can walk into a worship service, stand near the risen Jesus, and never meet him, for the very reason those two men missed him on the road. Their eyes were on their own hope. So were mine. That night I kept looking around the room wondering why everyone else was undone while I was untouched, and Jesus met me at the crossroads of my own hope, held up a mirror, and asked, what are you centered on? The problem was never the music. It was that I had come to make much of my own experience, and you cannot make much of yourself and much of Jesus at the same time.

So the real question, for any of us whose worship has gone cold, is not what style moves me. It is what am I centered on, and am I making much of Jesus? This is not a small thing. Becoming holy as Christ is holy only goes as far as we are willing to surrender and fix our eyes on him. If I keep building worship around my own desires, my hope will keep disappointing me, and I will keep missing the very presence I came for. And if I cannot recognize him here, among his people, how will I ever recognize him out in the world?

There is a line in the old hymn Come Thou Fount that I cannot get past: tune my heart to sing thy grace. I watched my son tune his guitar one afternoon and it has stayed with me. Every time you take a guitar out of its case it needs tuning. Leave it on a stand for a few days and it needs it again. The wood shifts with the humidity, the strings stretch and settle, and a guitar left alone will always drift out of tune. Our hearts are no different. All week long we get knocked around and pulled in a hundred directions, and by the time we gather again the strings are slack and sour. Hearts always need tuning. And they always need re-tuning.

So how do we tune a heart for worship? Mostly by not waiting until the music starts. A heart that makes much of Jesus is a heart that has been walking with him all week, so a little of Sunday’s worship really happens Monday through Saturday. Center yourself before you come. Read a little Scripture, sit quiet for ten minutes, put the songs on for the drive in. Come early, because worship is not only vertical but horizontal, and greeting one another is part of it. And give yourself to the first moments, the call to worship, the opening prayer, the first song, because sometimes the body leads the heart. Lift your hands, or cup them, and let it turn your affection toward Christ.

Watch what happens when a heart finally catches fire. When Jesus broke the bread their eyes were opened, they knew him, and they said to each other, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road? It was late. They had already stopped for the night. But they got up in the dark and ran the seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the others, he is alive. A burning heart cannot sit still. It has to make much of Jesus, and it wants to be near others who do too.

I still think about that defeated night in the hotel. I am grateful for it now, because that was the night Jesus met me on my own road to Emmaus and told me, gently, to stop making so much of me. So this is my prayer, and maybe it can become yours. Come, Thou Fount of every blessing. Tune my heart to sing thy grace.