This morning, I’d like to talk to you about the health of your heart. No – as you shall see in a minute, this is not a new twist on the social gospel. However… doing a little research on the internet, I found a list of cardiovascular diseases. Some of you may know more about these things than I do, because you’ve experienced some of them.
First on the list was “Coronary Artery Disease” – the narrowing of the coronary arteries from plaque buildup. “Cardiomyopathy” is a disease of the heart muscle that reduces its ability to pump blood. Simple “Heart failure” speaks of the hearts inability to pump enough blood to the body. Related to that is “congestive heart failure,” which results in the build up of fluids throughout the body. “Arrhythmias” speaks of abnormal heart rhythms, which can be too fast, too slow, or irregular. “Valvular Heart Disease” refers to problems with the heart valves, which can cause backflow or blockages. “Rheumatic Heart Disease,” speaks of heart damage to the heart from rheumatic fever, often caused by a streptococcal infection. “Hypertensive Heart Disease,” are problems resulting from high blood pressure. “Infective Endocarditis” is inflammation of the inner lining of the heart, often caused by bacteria. “Pericarditis,” is inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart. And there can be structural “congenital” heart problems, pointing to the fact they were present at birth.
I am told that most of these problems and diseases can be fatal if not treated. And in some cases, they may be discovered only during an autopsy. The victim didn’t even know that he had the disease. And this takes us directly into my subject for the day.
I want to talk to you about heart disease, but not as a doctor of medicine. For the sake of this message, picture me a practitioner of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. As such I don’t have any of the most modern diagnostic tools – EKGs, CTs and MRIs. But I have something far more appropriate for the disease I’m exposing – I have the infallible Word of God. Furthermore, I have the experience of suffering from this same fatal disease myself. I know whereof I speak.
Let’s start by COMPARING two hearts – one that is healthy and one that is not.
Genesis 6:5 says, “And GOD saw that the WICKEDNESS of MAN was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the THOUGHTS of his HEART was ONLY EVIL continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at HIS heart.” Like today, at what was very near the beginning of human life and society, wickedness was abounding. And to put it in human terms – “it grieved the heart of the Creator.” The Bible declares that the cause of that human wickedness – heart disease. That congenital problem arose in every human heart as a result of the introduction of sin. Then in Genesis 8:21, after the flood and as Noah sacrificed a number of thanksgiving offerings, “the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the lord said in HIS heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of MAN’S heart is EVIL from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.”
We’ve recently looked at those early chapters of Genesis, so I hope you remember that despite general references to wickedness and violence, very few specifics were mentioned after the murder of Abel. Those chapters don’t describe wars, murders, rapes, torture, arson or kidnappings. God simply sums everything up pointing to violence and wickedness and the evil hearts which created them.
Those two passages refer to both man’s heart and God’s heart twice. In regard to man, “Every imagination of the thoughts of his HEART was only EVIL continually – even from his youth.” But in contrast to that there are references to God’s heart. Here is place where we find the great gulf that separates us from Jehovah God. We can describe the symptoms in various ways, but the place of the problem is the heart. Jeremiah 17:9 reiterates that, saying – “The HEART is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” The Lord Jesus, the Son of God, said, “Out of the HEART proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man” – Matthew 15:19.
Essentially, you are what your heart is, and God is what His heart is. Proverbs 4:23 exhorts, “Keep thy HEART with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” And later in Proverbs – “For as he thinketh in his HEART so is he.” The Lord Jesus said, “A good man out of the good treasure of his HEART bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of HIS heart bringeth forth that which is evil…” – Luke 6:45. God’s heart is pure, incapable of anything wicked and filled with infinite, holy love. But our hearts, from the moment of our conception are filled with sin. We have a congenital, fatal, spiritual heart defect.
To put it another way, we are suffering from highly REBELLIOUS hearts.
But with whom are our hearts contending? Sometimes it is with other human hearts. Putin’s heart wants the Crimea, but so does Zelenskyy’s. And even hearts that love each other, sometimes get contentious over specific things. But the most dangerous cardio-problem is the contention between the holy heart of the Lord and sinful heart of man.
Please return to Hebrews 3:7 – “Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts…” Today, at this very moment, the Holy Spirit of God is speaking to your heart. You can hear Him. Like a friend and personal physician, He has only the very best advice to share with you. It is the gospel of the Lord Jesus – the message of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection as an atonement for your sin. You have a choice – you can listen and accept what He is saying, or you can reject. But there is a disease of the heart interfering with your spiritual hearing – your heart has been HARDENED. Our hearts do not want to hear what the Holy Spirit has to tell us.
“To day if ye will hear his voice, HARDEN not your HEARTS, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years.” This is a historical reference which the Hebrews knew very well. God offered to take Israel into the landHe promised to Abraham after He had brought them out of Egypt. But when He tested their faith, showing them the bounty of the land as well as the armies that possessed it, the hearts of Israel rebelled. And for forty years that generation saw God’s miracles and His further tests until they were all dead.
“Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway ERR in their HEART; and they have not known my ways. So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.)” Israel not only suffered from the fatal disease of hardened hearts, but also from ERRING hearts. Not only did their hearts shout – “NO God, we will not do what you tell us would be best for us.” But they also erred; they deliberately strayed. They said, “We are going to go our own way.” The hearts of Israel were contentious, rebellious and dying under their own self-deception.
“Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an EVIL heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God” Israel not only suffered from HARDENED hearts and ERRING hearts, but they had EVIL hearts. “And GOD saw that the WICKEDNESS of MAN was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the THOUGHTS of his HEART was ONLY EVIL continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him AT HIS HEART.” Take heed, brethren, lest you die of the same fatal diagnosis.
After repeating himself for emphasis, the writer of Hebrews concludes this thought in verse 17 – “But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness? And to whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them that believed not? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief.” With only two exceptions, all Israel died in the wilderness because of their evil, UNBELIEVING hearts.
Just think about that generation-long event – Israel’s wandering around in the desert until death took them. Earlier, for several generations, Israel had been suffering as slaves in Egypt. The sins of both the slaves and their masters, were making the people of Israel absolutely miserable. Just as your sin may be making you miserable – stress-testing that heart of yours. But then the Lord displayed His grace and power through the ten plagues, some of which touched both Israel and Egypt, but some of which were miraculously selective. And then the Red Sea parted as the Lord again showed His mighty power and grace. For a while God fed them, as Jesus did later – He fed not a few thousand but a few million, again and again. And He supplied water in the desert, a light in the night, guidance during the day and protection. But the rebellious, evil, hard hearts of that generation refused to believe what they saw and experienced. Ultimately, they could not receive God’s promise – “they could not enter in because of UNBELIEF.”
You and I may see the hand of God with our natural eye. We may look through the Hubble Telescope for 20 years and see the beauty and scope of God’s creation. We may marvel at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, or the uplifted monoliths of Rocky Mountains. We may study the mind of God though the minds of our foremost thinkers, performing almost unbelievable feats of mathematical calculations, or delving into the intricacies of atoms or DNA. But God is not touched by our eyes and hands, minds and calculations. God has chosen only one means of connection – our hearts to His heart. And that may be the weakest and most contentious part of any of us. We cannot enter into the heart of God because of our evil hearts of unbelief. It is not about our minds; it is a problem of the heart.
And only the solution to that problem is a heart transplant – CONVERSION – a spiritual heart replacement.
The Bible spends a great deal of time talking about Israel; her history and her problem. It is because that one nation is a little microcosm of every other nation, and the people of Israel are mirrors of all the rest of us. Maybe that is one reason that Israel has been the most hated nation in the history of nations.
Reading about Israel, let’s look at ourselves through God’s words in Ezekiel 36:16. “Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the uncleanness of a removed woman.” As a people and nation, we have been living in North America for more than 300 years. And history declares that God had a hand in the creation of this bountiful place as well as this nation. But over the years we have done more and more to desecrate God’s blessings and to destroy His bounty. With every generation, there have been fewer and fewer hearts willing to worship Him. Those are the obvious facts.
Verse 18 – “Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had shed upon the land, and for their idols wherewith they had polluted it.” Ours has become a bloody country, and I don’t mean that in the proverbial sense. As a whole, ours is a violent society, from the slaughtering of our unborn to the neglect of our elderly and the murder of so many in between. Furthermore, we have filled this country with our idols – from Hollywood icons to the statues of Mary, the saints and Buddha. So God scattered Israel “among the heathen, and they were dispersed through the countries: according to their way and according to their doings I judged them.” This may not be as literally true of America, as it has been true of Israel. But for us the scattering has been of the unbelieving and idolatrous among us. For years we have been welcoming non-believers, false-believers, and anti-believers. “And when they entered unto the heathen, whither they went, they profaned my holy name, when they said to them, These are the people of the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land.” As a society, we have accepted the idolatry, unbelief, philosophy and sin of the heathen, profaning God’s name. For example, the Biblical model of the home is dissolving, and the Biblical work-ethic is disappearing. We are reciting Hindu mantras and exercising ourselves with demonic-inspired yoga. And we import the mind-bending influences of reality denial. “And when they received the heathen into their midst, they profaned my holy name.”
But things change in Ezekiel 36:21 – “But I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the heathen, whither they went. Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I do NOT this for YOUR sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name’s sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went. And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, saith the Lord GOD, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes. For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.”
God says, “I will save you even from yourselves.” In grace and pity, throughout our history, the Lord has sent his prophets and preachers with His good news. This is not true of hundreds of nations where the gospel has been rarely preached. And this is not true of dozens of countries where the gospel has been preached in the past but where there is a spiritual vacuum today. America is a God-blessed place, because there are churches like ours, which still preach the message of sin and redemption through Christ.
“Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be CLEAN: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A NEW heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God. I will also save you from all your uncleannesses…” Notice all the “I wills.” I will take the initiative and I will do these things saith the Lord.
The answer to Israel’s problems and to the problems of our society, are not stronger governments and more laws. The answer is not cleaning out the Department of Education and demanding more traditional forms of instruction. The answer is not reestablishing blue laws and encouraging people to go to church on Sunday. It is not the defunding of Planned Parenthood, the police or removing the WOKE agenda from government. The answer is not in putting more religious, or even more godly, people in power, when still the average American heart is still filled with spiritual death. There is no point in the outward cleansing of our filthiness and destruction of our idols, if the root of the problem still exists – wicked, unsurrendered, unbelieving hearts. The answer to the problems of our nation is the creation of new hearts where the hard, erring, evil unbelieving hearts now reside.
You need to be born again. There is no point in spending seventy years living in utopia, if you die and go to hell for eternity. You need a new heart, so that you might have fellowship with God for that eternity. Jehovah instructed Ezekiel in 33:11 – “Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?”
Why will ye die O house of America? With all the cardiologists available to us today, there is no reason for our hearts to kill us. If you must, plead with the Lord for His cleansing water. Beg God for a new heart. Acknowledge your desperate, sinful and idolatrous condition, and bow before Him in repentance. David prayed, “Create in me a NEW heart O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me.” He said, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite HEART thou wilt despise.” As the New Testament tells us, put your faith and trust in God’s divine cardiologist – the Lord Jesus Christ. There is deliverance from our heart disease in no other hospital than the one which is found at the foot of the cross.