God's Heartbeat

Have you ever heard your own heartbeat? Chances are you have. You exert yourself and you can hear your heart beating as you try to catch your breath. Or maybe you lay in just a certain way and you can hear your pulse beat in your head, the gentle throbbing just at the edge of your awareness.

What does your heartbeat say? Sounds like a stupid question, I know. My heartbeat isn’t very eloquent – the best I can translate it, it says something like “Thump-thump, thump-thump.” Our hearts don’t say much except to a doctor who knows what an irregular or unruly beat means – for us, it is just a steady beating of a drum that means we are alive.

We celebrate Thanksgiving this week, and I will spend time thanking God for a good number of things. Included will be gratitude for my family and friends, for good health, and for the privilege of serving such a great and gracious God. I will let you in on a little secret – I will also spend time listening to God’s heartbeat and thanking Him for that as well.

God’s heartbeat – I am speaking in images now, but I think you can get the point pretty easily. You hear God’s heartbeat in an amazing Scriptural passage known as Psalm 136. The Psalm starts out with a triple plea to give thanks to God, and then there are statements that direct our attention to God as the One who created us, redeemed us, and sustains us. Pretty standard stuff for the Bible. What sets this Psalm off from all the rest is the refrain, the steady, recurring, ever beating, never stopping, always pulsing “thump-thump” of God’s heart. Only, God is more eloquent – twenty-six times the refrain sounds in Psalm 136, “His love endures forever.”

Writer Peter Wallace says this refrain continually and repeatedly reminds us that God loves us. Despite our weaknesses and failures, our circumstances and struggles, even our doubts and fears, God’s love for us is unswerving. “His love endures forever.”

The Apostle John reminds us of God’s tremendous love for us as manifested in Jesus’ determination to go to the cross for our sins. John 13:1 says, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.” What was the “full extent” of His love? He let His heartbeat stop on the cross so that when our heartbeats stopped in death, we would awaken in eternity with Him. Now, that is a love that endures forever.

Take some time this week and try to listen to your own heartbeat – and then listen to God’s heartbeat as reflected in Psalm 136 and in all the experiences of life as you follow Jesus. Sing a song of gratitude for the God who made us, saved us through Christ, walks with us through life.

Thump-thump, thump-thump – “His love endures forever.”