Heart Failure!

I don't understand how the heart works. Did you ever lie in the bed at night-just before going to sleep-feel your heart pumping blood throughout your body and wonder what was keeping it going? I've heard the medical explanations, but I still don't understand. It's a muscle, a pump, and it responds to electrical impulses. Impulses from where? I don't have a battery! I get charged up some times, run down other times, but never have figured out where the juice is coming from!

But it appears there's more to our heart than just the physical. The 'other part' of our heart stays pretty busy in day-to-day life. For example, what would Valentine's Day be without the other part of our heart? We can be broken-hearted, heavy hearted, hard-hearted, tender-hearted, soft-hearted and big-hearted. Tender moments 'touch' our heart. Stressful times or rich food give us heartburn. We laugh heartily and find good news heartening. Heartrending tragedies of tornadoes in the heartland evoke heartfelt sympathy from an entire nation. We take things to heart and memorize other things by heart. In the tougher moments of life we listen to our heart and are even encouraged by some to follow our heart. If necessary, we have a heart-to-heart talk with a close friend. There's a lot more going on in there besides pumping blood!

Problems with the physical heart-even though most of us don't understand specifically how it works-can be fixed in most cases if we catch the problem in time. The doctors tell us what is wrong, what we need to do, and we do it. But, do we ever have 'heart-failure' with the 'other part' of our heart? If so, what are the symptoms? Who is a good 'heart specialist' that we can trust to fix it if it does begin to fail us?

I recognize that many today don't believe in God, but for those who do, He has a lot to say about the 'other part' of our heart. ('Heart' appears in The King James Bible 870 times…not an overlooked topic!) The problem is many don't like what He says because it isn't 'uplifting' news. The first time 'heart' appears in the Bible is in God's evaluation of mankind. The LORD saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. (Genesis 6:5-6 NIV) Man's heart is evil…God's heart is grieved. This is not good news and many choose to ignore the prognosis. If the cardiologist gave us a similar report about our physical heart, would we get mad and storm out of the doctor's office complaining, "If going to the doctor means I have to listen to negative reports that bring me down all the time, I just won't go!"?

Even some of the 'secular' community are beginning to recognize some of the symptoms of a bad heart. William Murchison, a nationally syndicated columnist wrote about the recent outbreaks of violence in our country:

"Indeed-why did the Colorado kids massacre their schoolmates? …For want of strong gun-control laws? On account of industrial music, suburban stress, community failure to recognize psychic disorder? …America is in for a period of psychiatric self-examination, wherein all kinds of discrete ideas are vented: gun control, metal detectors, more attention to spotting and isolating trouble makers. Very well. What about something even more productive, like recovering the culture's lost sense of evil? The post-Littleton quest for Reasons is doomed to failure unless that quest extends to long abandoned territory: the human heart, with which-so our forbears believed-something is radically amiss. (Murchison also acknowledged that people don't like to hear this evaluation of the human heart "…appraisals of this sort do not sit well today…", but continued none-the-less.)

"Why, and what do we do about it? The why is something we used to capsulize as the Fall of Man. The what-we-do-about-it is that which former generations well understood as repentance: the return to God; prodigal children throwing themselves on the father's mercy, receiving uproarious welcome. What became of this old impulse to turn from evil and submit to God? That belief, over the past couple of centuries, became harder and harder to sustain as philosophers taught, and popularizers embraced, a gospel of human perfectibility. Where everything is getting better and better, thoughts of sin and guilt evaporate. They say we need gun control. I say what we need most is an infusion of the old-time religion. I don't mean shouting and holyrolling. I mean the old-time religion of love and adoration instead of pride and self-assertion. I recovering such religion we might save our souls and our society. Possibly a secular writer has no business saying so."

The good news is that if we heed the advice of this 'secular' newspaper columnist, there is hope for total and complete recovery. In Ezekiel, God gives the outcome of the recommended spiritual surgical procedure:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people, and I will be your God.

Have you had your heart checked recently? It does more than pump blood, you know!