Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled

What Is Troubling Your Heart?

“Does the national news trouble your heart does our economy trouble your heart does the unknown of your health trouble your heart.” The news starts by saying good evening and then spends the next half hour or hour telling you why it is not a good evening. There are many things troubling our hearts, and some of you carry something this morning that no one else knows about. On Easter I opened John 14, where Jesus says to his disciples, “let not your heart be troubled.”

The Upper Room

To understand these six verses, we have to understand the context. John 12 through 19 take place on one day in the life of Christ, and the teaching in chapters 13 through 19 is called the Upper Room Discourse. It is the longest and last teaching time of Jesus, a very intimate setting with his eleven disciples, because Judas has already left. Jesus tells them he is leaving. Peter asks where he is going and why he cannot follow, and Jesus tells him he will deny him three times. Their biggest leader had just been corrected, one of them would betray Jesus, and I am sure they were sitting there asking, is it I? That troubled their hearts. Then Thomas asks how they can know the way.

Believing in Jesus Will Settle Your Heart

The word troubled literally means “to shake back and forth and to agitate and to stir up.” It means to disturb, to unsettle, to throw into disorder. This is a command: “he commanded them not to have a heart that was troubled about the future and about the unknown.” That does not mean we never have cause for a troubled heart. Jesus himself was troubled when Lazarus died. But when it comes to our future and our eternity, Jesus says do not let it happen.

I love the way one writer put it, that “inner peace comes not from tranquil circumstances but from an untroubled heart.” We trust a God who can give that peace. Jesus says, “believe in God believe also in me.” If you trust God, you can trust me. We believe in his person, who he is and his relationship with the Father, and also in his plan. “God had a plan from eternity past of how he is going to deal with sin your sin and my sin.”

Believing What Jesus Has Done Will Settle Your Heart

Jesus describes heaven in verses 2 and 3: “I’m never going to run out of rooms for people who want to follow me.” The picture is from the Old Testament, of a man who is betrothed going back to his father’s house to prepare a place before he comes to take his bride. But think about what that going involved. “Going to heaven involves more than just being there.” Jesus did not leave the upper room for heaven. “He’s going to go through Agony and beatings and the crucifixion and the grave and the resurrection.” If there is no cross, there is no heaven.

He is also coming again, and I wonder if you will be ready. I told the church about a house that was only a home because of one person in it, the one who cooked Southern fried chicken and took me along to garage sales. “That house means nothing to us without her.” In the same way, “Jesus is the one who makes heaven heaven.” If you are a follower of Christ, you will be with the Lord forever. But I also have to say that there is a heaven to gain and a hell to forsake.

Believing That Jesus Is the Way Will Settle Your Heart

Thomas asked the question the others were afraid to ask. How can we know the way? Praise the Lord for guys like Thomas who ask a question when it needs to be asked. Jesus did not say he is a way among many. He said, “I am the way there’s one way and I am that way.” He is also the truth, and people so often say what I once said to the man who shared the gospel with me: “I’m like you know I’m a pretty good person I’ve never killed anybody.” But “going to heaven or salvation is not based on what you do it’s based on what Christ has done.”

And he is the life. That life is not only down the road. We were dead in our trespasses and he raised us up, he saved us, he changed us. Romans 6:23 says the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, and “it’s a gift you can’t work for it.” That is the Easter story.

Believers and Unbelievers

If you are a believer, Jesus says in this same chapter, “peace I leave with you my peace I give to you not as the world gives.” Do not put your hope and your dependence in anything this world has to offer. And if you are here without Christ, Jesus said in Matthew 25 that there is another place prepared, originally for the devil and his angels. God is not willing that any should perish. “Where will you spend eternity?”