Open Your Hand

How do you keep your heart open in a world that keeps giving you a reason to close it?

After enough disappointment, it is easy to become guarded. We've all been hurt. We've all trusted the wrong people. We've all wondered if being compassionate is worth the risk.

In this sermon from Deuteronomy 15:7-11, Pastor Jason Barnett explores God's command to "open your hand" and reveals that the real issue isn't our wallets, it is our hearts. Before our hands ever close, our hearts do.

Discover how God's generosity toward us through Jesus Christ transforms our hearts so we can become people with open hands, open homes, and open lives.

Linkoln shares his story on why he started coming to Ravenna Church of the Nazarene and shares why you should consider doing the same.

Ravenna Church of the Nazarene
530 Main Street, Ravenna, KY 40472

Transcript

Pastor Jason 0:00

Long before your hand closes, your heart usually dies. I'm Pastor Jason Market, and this is the Dirt Pass from the Podcast. Welcome back to the Dirt Pastorin Podcast. I'm Pastor Jason Martin, aka the Dirt Path Pastor, and I am so glad you're listening. And this sermon is one where I almost made David's mac and cheese cold. He was making David was pitching for his his wife, who's been sick this week, and making mac and cheese, and so I almost made it cold. Um and during this Sunday, I looked up at the clock and it w before I got started with the sermon, and I saw that it was 15 minutes until noon. I thought, I still got a little time. And the next time I looked up, it was like it was 20 minutes over. So somewhere in the back of mine, I just kept thinking, I hope David's Macintosh survives it. And sometimes the sermon just takes on a life of its own, and this was one of those weeks. As I prepared this message, I kept coming back to one question. How do you keep your heart open in a world that keeps giving you reasons to close it? If you've ever lived, or if you've lived for very long, you've been hurt. You've helped people who disappointed you, you've trusted people who've let you down. If we're not careful, those experiences don't just close our hands, they close our hearts. So whether you're listening on your morning commute, sitting on your back porch with a cup of coffee, winding down after a long day, my prayer is that God would remind you just how generously he has loved you. And that his love would keep your heart open in a world that often tells us to shut it. So grab your Bible if you've got one, and let's head down the dirt path together. Well, we're gonna we're gonna be in the book of Deuteronomy today, Deuteronomy chapter 15. Um, and as you're turning there, I was uh I was reading again in this magazine called Nazareth Compassionate Ministries, and actually I put an order form out there if you're interested in reading it, springs filled out, and they'll send you a free one in the mail. It just tells you different stories of what the Nazarene Compassionate Ministries are doing around the world. Um while it's written this week, I came across a story about a man named Julius. And Julius lives in the Philippines and serves in one of our Nazarene churches or facilities over there, and but he wasn't always known as Julius. Matter of fact, and when he was named from birth, his name was, and I'm gonna probably say this wrong, but his name was Chukoi. That was his name. And he grew up in a home that was kind of the opposite of peaceful. I'm not gonna go into a lot of details, but you could probably picture what kind of home I'm talking about. And I think dysfunctional would be a kind way to say it. But by the time he was 11, he began looking for anywhere else that he could live. First, his friends became his escape. He would sneak out of the house and go hang out with his friends. But after that, then it became cigarettes. Then it became alcohol. Then nights wandering the streets until eventually the streets become streets became his home. But one day, Chacoy started going to a place just to get some food. He was living out behind a restaurant eating out their trash food, but he worked about this place that fed people for free, and it just so happened it was a Nazarene facility that fed teens and kids. So he starts going, and he's just there for the free food. That's all that's all he's there for. But one of the leaders kept inviting him to go to camp. And every time the leader invited him, he would say, No, that leader was persistent. Right? He's just there for the food. But finally, just to get that youth leader to be quiet, he's like, okay, I'll go. And as at that camp when he was listening to people pray, you know how some of our kids would shared that. Their big thing, the thing they learned from camp was you don't have to be quiet for you to pray. You can pray out loud. He heard people praying like that. And then he started asking questions, and as he began to ask those questions, something inside Jakoy had shifted. That's that something was he encountered Jesus. And so he ends up making a decision to follow Jesus and give his life to Jesus. And when that happens, he in that moment, right in there, he said, Not only am I going to get to start a new life with Jesus, I am going to bury the old me now. And by that he meant I am no longer gonna go by the name Traquid, because that name no longer has any value to me. I'm gonna go by Julius. And now Julius is not only is he saved, but he's actually serving the people that are living on the very same streets that God rescued him from. It's an amazing story, isn't it? It's incredible, it's powerful. But as I was reading his story, and yeah, the story moved because there was one sentence though that stopped me. In that sentence, this is what it said. It said they were parts of his story he hesitated to share. Not because they were untrue, but because of the fear of judgment. So he was going to this church to get food, just full of free food, and people were investing in, loving him, trying to get to know him, and he was afraid to share his life, to share who he was, what he was going through with those people, because of how they might look at him, what they might think about him. That broke my heart. But I think I think it's sad with me because I think we all understand what Julius meant when he says that. Right? What will people think of me? We all think about that. Maybe he's thinking, you know, we all think, okay, if they really know who I am, they really know what I've done, will they still keep helping me? Will they still care about me the same way? And the reason why we ask that is we've been on the other side of that sometimes, right? Where we've all helped somebody, right? We've done nice things for them, but they disappointed us that we were generous and they they wasted our generosity. Because we've had experiences like that in life, our hearts have kind of grown cold and callous. So sometimes we tend to look at people that are injoying the situation with this judgmental attitude. Because that's what we've experienced, and that's what has happened for life experiences. And I believe that's what Moses is addressing in Deuteronomy chapter 15. That's what we're gonna look at. I'm gonna get I'm gonna try and go as quickly as I can. Okay. Um Deuteronomy chapter 15, I'm reading verses 7 through 11. He says, Now, if there are some poor among you, say one of your fellow Israelites and one of your cities in the land that the Lord your God has given you, don't be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your poor fellow Israelites. To the contrary, open your hand wide to them. You must generously lend them whatever they need. But watch yourself. Make sure no wicked thought crosses your mind, such as the seventh year, you know, that year of debt cancellation. So that you resent your poor fellow Israelites and don't give them anything. If you do that, they will cry out to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. No, give generously to needy persons. Don't resent giving to them because it is the very thing that will lead to the Lord your God's blessing you and all you do work at. Poor persons will never disappear from the earth. That's why I'm giving you this command. You must open your hand generously to your fellow Israelites, to the needy among you, and to the poor who will live with you in your land. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Alright, so Deuteronomy, this is Moses' farewell address. This is his last speech, last sermon before he and the people are gonna separate.

unknown 10:00

Right?

Pastor Jason 10:00

And at this point, God's chosen people of Israelites. They are, you know, they're essentially twelve tribes wandering through the desert. But now they're on the reek of going into the promised land. And it's a new generation that's gonna be entering the promised land because all the other ones that were stubborn and fearful had already died off. So Moses is giving them, he's teaching them who they have to be, to be God's people in the promised land. Now, this is very important today. You all come tell me in our news, you're like, oh, we're gonna go to church and Pastor Jason's gonna talk about money. This this is not that sermon. Okay, this is not a sermon about tithing. Moses' words here is not about tithing. Tithing is important, but the sermon is not a tithing sermon. And you can ask the people here, I've only preached one of those since I've been here for four years. Now, in the sermon, it's not about increasing the church budget because money is not the core issue being discussed in these verses. The core issue is it's more about what do God's redeemed people look like. And so that's the kind of what Moses is addressing here. So we look at verse 7. It says if it says, if there are some poor persons, notice Moses isn't saying that there might be poor persons, or that they're they're, you know, how do I word it? He's he doesn't word it in a way that make it sound like the poor person is the problem, or that poor people don't exist. He's not ignoring their existence, he's saying poor people are gonna be out there, they're going to exist. We live in a simple, broken world of simple, broken systems that's going to produce produce oppression, poverty, brokenness. And so there are going to be people in poverty out there. Then he goes on to say, if there are some four persons among you, you don't harden your heart or be tight-fisted. That phrase harden your heart. We've heard this before in Moses' story, right? Remember, Moses goes to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh you know, he tells Pharaoh, let my people go. And Pharaoh doesn't do it, and he always says, Pharaoh, hardened his heart, right? Harden his heart, he blocked his heart, he strengthened his heart, he rebelled in his heart against God. So Moses is saying here is when you come across poor people, when they come to you, do not harden your heart against them. Don't do it. Not only that, he says, don't be tight in this meaning, don't have a closed hand. But notice before he mentions the closed hand, he first highlights the closed heart. He says, Don't harden your heart or close your hand. The closed heart leads to the closed hand. Going on in verse 8, Moses says, Open your hand wide. And I love the Hebrew here because the Hebrew word literally means open open your hands. Don't just go. It's I wanted to say jazz hands, right? I thought that'd be fun. But but again, this is not a barely open, it's not a reluctant open, right? It's not a okay, my hands are open, but I'm gonna complain about it the whole time. It's my hands are open, it's an emphatically and generously open. And Moses goes on to say, we're saying, open your hand wide to meet the need. Alright, so the next verse, it's it might be verse 9, it might be the most important because it says, watch yourself. Again, when we read that, we hear watch ourselves, we think we gotta watch ourselves because we've been burned before, we've been disappointed before. But Moses says, make sure no wicked thought crosses your mind. He's saying poverty is not the greatest danger that you're gonna run into. The greater dangers when you run into poverty is that your heart is going to be closed. That you're gonna look at that person and you're going to judge them. And you're not, you're gonna refuse to help them. Then he gives us an example of that. See, the Jews had this practice of every, you know, after seven years, there's a seven-year period, and at the end of the seven-year period, all debts were canceled. That's why it's called the year of cancellation. And so what Moses is saying is don't think about the fact that it's year six, right? A week to go, it's about to give you your seventh. Don't think about the fact that if you give to them, that they're not gonna have to pay you back in five days, right? That you're not getting paid back. He's saying, don't think about that. Don't reject me because you're not getting anything in return. The issue he's talking about here is not ability, it's the fact that they stopped and calculated what it would cost them. They they weighed whether, okay, is this worth it for me or not worth it for me? See, God is opposed to transactional generosity. Because that's not generosity, that's a trade. God doesn't give give us things, God doesn't give anyone, anything, expecting anything in return. And his love causes people to do the same thing. So we move into verse 10, and it shares that Israelites should give freely without resentment. Now, you can read verse 10 and think, okay, Pastor Jason, if I put money in the offering plate, I'm gonna go get a linen lottery ticket, I'm gonna go play their slot machines next door and hit the jackpot, right? That's I'm getting I gained, so God should bless me. This is not that verse. This is not a prosperity gospel because if that's the case, if we give to get God's blessing, what are we doing? We're trying to give to get something. That's not what this verse is saying. It means God's favor will be on that person who gives because they want to give. They give because they love. All right, let me go to verse 11. And actually, verse 11, you've probably heard it before. If you've read through the gospels, you know Jesus says the cord will always be among you. Right? And he says that to Judas, who objects to the fact that this woman pours out the expensive perfume on his feet. So what Jesus is saying, as long as sin endures, as long as Jesus tarries, there's going to be these broken sinful systems in phrase where people are going to be oppressed, people are going to make poor decisions, people are going to be living in chains, whether they're created by themselves or created by other people, people are going to be living in slavery to poverty. It's always going to be there until Jesus comes back. But what this verse 11 is saying is the existence of poverty is not permission for us to be indifferent. In fact, poverty is the reason God's people must never stop being generous. God's command to his people is always open your hand. So again, remember, this verse, these verses are not, it's about we're not talking about this idea of the open hand. We're talking about the key to having the open hand. That's really what we're getting after. I don't know if I said that in the beginning or not. I'm going fast, so my brain is ping ponging. Like I didn't have any coffee or anything to make me focus this morning, so now my brain's like a yesterday tasting a ping pong ball. Um but the key in these verses is the heart, right? Because God's people keep their hearts open. And we keep our hearts open because God has been generous to us. But here's the thing: what we do with our hands reveals our hearts. If our hand is closed, it indicates we have a closed heart. God's goal is not to make us generous people. We should be generous people. That's not God's aim. God's aim with us is to make us his holy people. And holy people have hearts that reflect God's word. So one or two things happens to us, right? First, we become cynical. We become cynical because while we gave to somebody, and then they wasted it or they did something with it that we didn't like or didn't expect them to do. That we have that blessing box out in front of our college problem, right? Sometimes early on, I would get frustrated because somebody would come in and just clean the whole box out. Not thinking about other people needing it too. I changed my mind real quick as I talked to somebody who showed him right along already cleared out. You know what he was doing? He was clearing it out, taking it for people who couldn't get in the box. And so over time we stop trying to see those who need help. We ask, before we give her gettings, can we trust them? Or sometimes we can even get cynical because you know what? I was in their shoes once, and no one helped me. We can develop a cynical attitude like that. And you're wrong, someone did help you. His name is Jesus. You just didn't know it. Now, Moses, he warns against this idea of becoming cynical. He goes so far as to say, if you don't, if you ignore this, if you don't give, then you are sinning against God. He warns against us. He warns us to not let our people experience become a hardness of heart. He warns us to protect them. He tells us you can protect your wisdom. Yes, we have to dig things through, right? Sometimes giving someone money isn't always the best option, but we we can't give we can't give them money, right? Like money is not the right option that we can give them. Love. We can give them human dictators, we can give them respect. So Moses wants to protect your wisdom, but in the process of that, don't give up being compassion. Our wisdom is governed by love. The second thing we tend to do, right? We're just becoming second is we can't we can give, but with an impure heart. So maybe you can fool you. Sometimes you can fool people by opening your hand and making it look like you're generous, but in reality, you're not generous because your hand may look open on the outside, but really it's closed because you're open, only opening your hand because you're expecting someone to give you something. Very early on in my mission. I wouldn't say this now because this is not a thing a pastor should say. Very early, I had someone in the church tell me and say, Pastor Jason, I give the most money in this church out of any Bible. So you should do it this way because I give the most money. And I looked and I said, You can keep your money, sir. Then I left 18 months later. Why? Because he was giving, expecting to gain some. He was giving because he thought, if I give the most money, I should have the most influence in the church. If I give the most, and the church should do what I say. That's not true. Because that's not a gift to the church. That is you trying to use the church. For your own selfish purposes. That's a transaction. A transaction is not a gift. Yeah, we can give sometimes and make it look like our hands open, but it's really not because of a closed heart. And we can we can give up our time, we could give up our influence, our praise. But then if we're doing it for any other reason for the simply the sake of love, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. And sometimes, too, and along those same lines, we can give still give for the wrong reasons, but maybe it's not intentional. Like it's real easy to put food in the blessing box and walk away because we know somebody's gonna come along and get it. We don't ever have to meet those people, have a conversation with them, get to know their game oil story. That's good. It's important that we're feeding people, we're helping people. But if you were to run into that person at the blessing box, would you invite them to come sit with you on Sunday? You can you can you can give food, you can give your money, you can give your time, but if they are not welcome in the presence of Jesus with you, then you're not giving with an open hand, you're giving with a closed hand because your heart's closed. That's what Moses is warning against. He's worrying, he's warning, that's because that's a judgmental attitude, whether we recognize it as judgmental or not. For some reason, we're either not seeing that person as a person worthy of dignity, or we see them as a person, but we say they're not worthy of it. Either way, it's wrong. Again, Moses warns us against this. He warns us to not give, expecting something in return. Why? Because this is what God has done for us. God has given to us not because we earned it, not because we deserved it, but because God loved us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. You see, every one of us, we were spiritually poor, not even poor as not even a poor, we were spiritually bankrupt. We owed a debt because of our sin that we could never repay. But God not once sat down and recapitulated whether we were worth it or not. What did God do? What God did was he opened up his hand and he sent his son. He sent his son and gave his son up because God forgot so loved the world that he gave us one and only son, so that we should not perish but have everlasting life. I think I can find the KJB N I B and other translations all at once, and you get the point. God didn't do it because we were worthy of it, God did it because he loved us. When Jesus was on that cross, what did he do? He stretched out his hands to save us. He died on the cross to save people with a closed heart. And closed hands. And that's what the good news of the gospel is. It's that God doesn't simply forgive us, He transforms us from the inside out. He takes those of us who are closed-handed, closed-hearted, and what does he do? He takes out our closed heart that's made out of stone and rock, and he says, This heart's no good, so I'm gonna bring my whole my heart into you. I'm gonna bring a heart into you that's new, that's born of the spirit from above. So we he transforms this from people who are closed-hearted and closed-handed people, who because God loved us so much, we realize how much God loves us. The only thing that we have can hold or offer here, not because God demands it, not because God offered it, but because we genuinely love God is I'm gonna take everything that I have, everything who I am, and I'm going to give it to God for God's glory. Not because I'm coerced, not because I'm trying to win a popularity contest, not because I'm trying to go to the most influential person on Facebook, TikTok, or whatever it is. But because I genuinely love Jesus. Because I love Jesus, I love the people he created. No matter who they are or what they've done, no matter how poor or spiritually bankrupt they are, I'm going to love them. Not for who they could be, but for who they are right in that moment. Sometimes that's hard when you're sitting in a camp form with a kid that's very being very defiant and doesn't want to listen to you. Remember Julius from the beginning I talked about? Remember what Julius was afraid of? He said, I was afraid to share my story because people would judge me. He was afraid, he was terrified, he was pet. He kept quiet because he was scared of what closed hearts might do to him. Where was he at? He was in the church. He was in the church afraid that he was going to encounter closed hearts. Now, I don't know, I've never been to this church, I've never been to the Philippines. I've seen pictures. I can walk the streets of vanilla on Google Maps. That's not the same thing. I don't feel the breeze in my hair or smell the smells of the city. I get that fear. So he was afraid in God's house, in God's 15,000 people, they were gonna judge him. But you know what happens? Now again, experience talking about experience had him worried and concerned. It may have been that church, may have been a different church, maybe a different church person, but he encountered that somewhere he was afraid. But somewhere, someone began through the power of the Holy Spirit began to change his mind. And it was that one youth worker, right? That one youth worker who kept saying, Come to camp with me. Hey, that camp worker, he knew that kid was just there for the food. One of my running jokes is if you want to build a youth group, get a bunch of girls because the boys will show up. That was a joke, by the way. Hopefully that answer wasn't funny.

SPEAKER_04 28:56

Or you all smell David's mac and cheese and ready to go eat it. Anyway.

Pastor Jason 29:03

But he that that youth leader kept on him, right? It kept inviting him. And rather than that youth leader get callous and be like, I've invited him a thousand times, I quit, I'm giving up. He just kept doing it until one day that kid goes to camp. And in an instance, his life has changed forever. Friends, there are people all around us carrying stories like Julius' story. Carrying stories of what poverty has forced them to encounter. Stories of addiction, of what addiction has done to their lives, to their families' lives. There are people living in family households that putting it saying they're dysfunctional is a right way to say what's going on. Because if your heart's closed, your hand will be closed. The only way to convince them that our hand is open is to have an open heart. I'll tell you some of the hardest moments I've had in ministry are people that have closed hands and closed hearts toward me. God said, Go minister to them anyway. They might be mad at me, they might be yelling at me, they didn't even crush me out, they may have posted meaning things about me in places, but God says go minister to them anyway. Be kind anyway. Be generous anyway. Don't close off your calendar to him. Open it up to him. Anyway. Yeah, they need the lot, but I I was that salesman, I keep calling you, I keep mailing you, I keep emailing. You gave me your contact, no matter how you did it, I would send a carry your pigeon if I figured out where your house works. I'm that same way though. Everybody in this room, whether I know you or not, Jesus loves you and I love you, and I'm gonna pray for you. Not am I just gonna pray for you? I'm gonna pray for y'all. Would you give me a moment where we can spend some time together and get to know each other so they can see that my heart's open and my hands open? Not because of me, but because of you. I want them to see your love and be transformed so they can realize that there's freedom and grace out there, that their story doesn't have to stay the same rope and story, that you can take their story and write a new one. And the only way that's gonna happen is if my heart's open. And if my heart's open, my hand will be open. It takes not just me, though, it takes all of us doing that at the church. Right? They say it takes what seven positive connections to overcome one bad one. I mean, again, we have to do that because why God never closed his heart towards us. So we should let our hearts be closed. We can't let disappointment harden our heart. We have to open our hands, we have to open our own, we have to open our tables, open our lives because someone else's story may begin where your compassion refuses to give up. Again, an open heart opens the hand, and the open hand reflects the heart of God. So right now, this morning asking, is your heart open? Not asking, is your hand open? Ask me, is your heart open? Right now, if you if someone, if you were to go to the blessing box, you looked at someone in need, would you see that as a person that was worthy of the dignity that God created them with? Would you look at that person and see them as a person Jesus was willing to die for? Because if Jesus is willing to die on the cross for them, if the Father is desperately waiting for them to come back home, if the Holy Spirit is constantly calling to them, saying, Come to me, who are we to not show them relentless compassion? We have to open up our hands, but first we have to open up our hearts. I know it's we're getting ready to go eat, we're getting ready to go next door. But this morning, maybe you're hearing you're with one of those two hands, right? You're you're you're you have a cowloused heart because you've been burned by one too many people. Well, this morning the Holy Spirit wants to heal you. He wants to take that cowus off so you can feel his love. And you can see the people that he's called you to share his love with. Maybe here today you've encountered someone. That they definitely had a closed heart and a closed hand. Maybe that was you. I don't know. I don't I'm not judging anybody. I'm just throwing out like this. But I know the Holy Spirit is probably talking to you right now about wherever you're at, but I just want you to know this. The Holy Spirit wants to show you how much Jesus loves you. He wants to transform your life. He wants to do a work in your life like he's doing it justice in his life. And again, just I don't need to pick on you to call you out, but man, it's just so much fun to me to watch what Jesus is doing. Every time you share a post, every time you write a thought on scripture, it's like, wow, look what Jesus is doing. God's not done changing stories. So let him open your heart to screen so you can open him. Let's go to the word in prayer. Has your heart started to close? And friend, I know that is a tough question, but before you move on with your day, I have to ask it. Maybe your heart has started closed because someone took advantage of your kindness. Perhaps someone lied to you, disappointed you, or broke your trust. Maybe you've helped before and it didn't seem to make a difference, and little by little, you become more guarded. Or perhaps you're on the other side of this message. Maybe you relate more to Julius. You wondered if people would still love you if they knew your whole story. You've been carrying shame, convinced your past will always define you. Well, the good news is that Jesus meets both of us. He meets the person with the closed heart, and he meets the person with the broken heart. And just didn't wait until we deserved his grace. He opened his hands on the cross and gave himself for us. He can forgive your sins, give you a new heart, and begin transforming your life. And if you've never trusted Jesus, today can be the day you surrender your life to him. If you're already following Jesus, maybe your prayer today isn't, Lord, give me more to give. Maybe it's simply, Lord, don't let my heart grow hard. Help me love people the way you love them. The way you love me. Let's pray together. Lord, thank you for never closing your heart toward us. When we are spiritually poor and can never repay you, you opened your hand and gave us your son. Thank you for your grace that forgives us, your spirit that transforms us. Lord, search our hearts. If disappointment, fear, pride, or judgment has hardness, softness again. Help us to be wise without becoming cynical, compassionate without being callous, and generous because you have first been generous to us. And for the person who has never trusted Jesus, draw them to yourself today. Let them know that no story is beyond your redemption. And for those who already belong to you, continue shaping us into people whose open hearts lead to open hands. We ask all this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Now I'd love to hear from you. If this episode encouraged you, challenged you, or if it's a way I can pray for you, send me an email at dirtpath at gmail.com. Know the no capitals, dirtpathpastor at gmail.com. You can also contact connect with me on TikTok and Facebook. Uh you'll find some daily devotional content on on those places if you find me on there. And you can also find me just by simply searching the Dirt Pastorman podcast or the Dirtpath Pastor on Google. Uh now if today's message was meaningful, and you would would you do me a favor, share this devastate with a friend. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and consider supporting this ministry. But just know when you support this ministry, you're not giving to me, you're not giving to the show. You're giving to Nasma Compassionate Ministries. And every gift helps bring the love of Christ to people facing disasters, poverty, hunger, and crises around the world. It's one small way we can all keep our hands open. Now, as you head into this week, remember this. Don't let disappointments of yesterday determine the compassion of tomorrow. God has never closed his heart towards you. So keep your heart open. Keep your hand open. And trust that God can begin someone else's story where your compassion refuses to end. Until next time, grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Asp Podcast.com and if you'd like to send me a message on just a free thing.