The average human heart will beat between 2 and 3 billion times in a  lifetime.  Amazing little thing.  But when it’s sick, when it’s diseased, that can be life threatening. And it’s the same with our other heart too – that deep place where we live – you know, your heart.  

Your heart and my heart, well I don’t know if you’ve ever thought much about this but our hearts are amazing little machines. Let me give you just a few vital statistics. This ball of muscle in your chest, it’s about the size of your clenched fist but it’s much, much stronger.

It’s built like a Sherman tank. In fact, when it comes to staying power, pulling power, reliability, durability, a Sherman tank has nothing on your heart. In a lifetime your heart will pack much more punch than any Sherman tank will in its lifetime.

In an average life time a human heart will beat somewhere between 2 and 3 billion times. About 70 to 80 beats each minute. Minute after minute. Hour after hour. Day after day. Year in, year out. Without skipping so much as a beat. Every day your heart will pump around 7,000 litres, that’s about 1,500 gallons. In a life time your heart will pump enough blood to fill between 80 and 100 Olympic swimming pools, or about 500 average backyard pools.

Here’s the amazing thing, we don’t even notice it. Yet let it stop beating and you and I would die within just a few minutes. Because it’s our lifeblood. It pumps the blood which delivers oxygen and removes waste. Just a few short minutes without that blood being pumped, every one of our hundred trillion or so cells in our body, and life ceases.

Pretty amazing little device the old heart.

And yet, in the developed world about half the people over the age of 55 have Coronary Heart Disease. In fact, Coronary Heart Disease is the number one killer in the western world. So whilst in the developing world HIV AIDS and lower respiratory infections are the big killers followed by heart disease and diarrhoea, in the developed world heart disease and stroke are by far the greatest killers.

But here’s the crazy thing, we know how to prevent heart disease. What are the top causes? Well, being over weight, high cholesterol, smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise. I don’t think there’s one person listening today who couldn’t have listed those. And what’s more, most of them are relatively easy to deal with.

People can dramatically reduce their risk of heart disease by losing some weight, eating healthier foods, quitting smoking, exercising. By and large, we can save lives by taking some very simple steps. Yet we don’t.

Here are some stats. Back in 2002, just over 57 million people died in the world. 42% of those were through heart disease. Now if we take that to just the developed world, the percentage killed by heart disease is much, much higher.

This isn’t some statistical apparition. It’s not some odd blip. Millions and millions of people each year are dying before their time because of something that, for the vast majority, is entirely preventable. Those morbidity statistics don’t begin to count the cost to health care systems, to economies. They don’t begin to tell the story of misery and suffering and years of chronic disease and isolation and fear and…

Are you getting the picture here? This is nuts. The heart is such a powerful, precious, life-giving thing. And we abuse it to the point of death. The human race is so smart, so creative, so amazing. How can we be so stupid? It defies understanding. We’re like a bunch of lemmings all heading in the same direction, over the edge of a cliff to fall to our deaths.

Now why are we talking about this? Well interesting but the heart is something that God talks a lot about too. Although He’s not so much meaning our human heart. But the heart is a picture of, well, who we are. It’s a symbol both in the Old Testament and in the New, of the essence of the person.

We acknowledge that a lot in our every day language. We talk about losing heart. Throwing our heart into something. Doing something with all our heart. We use phrases like taking things to heart. The heart of the matter. Setting our hearts on something.

The heart is, it’s a symbol of the essence of life. And given what the heart actually is, that’s not surprising.

When God talks about the heart He’s talking about the inner being. The inner most part. The seat of our appetite, our emotion, our passion, our courage, our fear. The middle, the central, the inner most part of the person.

Over these next few weeks we’re going to spend some time looking at our hearts. I’ve called this series on the program, “Oh God, Come Heal My Heart”. Because in the same way that wrong eating and wrong living and lack of exercise is killing millions of people each year needlessly. So a different heart disease is robbing people of life, here and now. And not just here and now but of eternal life.

The worlds full of a disease of the heart that’s stunting people’s lives. Stopping them from living their lives to the full. Stopping them from living the life that God always planned for them to live ’cause that’s what heart disease does.

And just like the physical heart we behave as though nothing’s wrong. We behave as though there’s not a problem. We know the facts but we ignore them.

Solomon was talking to some young men. He was writing to them this amazing wisdom from God. And this is what he says in Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23. He says:

Above all else guard your heart …

What a great piece of advice. Guard your heart. Value it. Treasure it. Keep it safe.

… for it is the well spring of life.

Problem is, we just live life. We shove food into our mouths. We don’t exercise. And then we wonder why we’re having heart attacks in epidemic proportions. And why should the inner heart be any different?

If we have an angry heart or a fearful heart or a hard heart or a sorrowful heart. If we lose heart or set our heart on the wrong things. Why is it that we would imagine that those things would somehow help us to lead a full life? Why is it that we would imagine that we wouldn’t lead a diseased life? Let me read it to you again. Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23:

Above all else guard your heart for it is the well spring of life.

Literally what it says here in the original Hebrew language in which it was written in the Old Testament is:

Diligently guard, watch over and preserve the heart in the way that the watchmen of old would stand on the rampart of the fortified city to keep watch for the enemy that was coming to attack. Keep watch. Be watchful. Watch over, guard and protect your heart.

Cities, in those days, had walls and fortifications built around them to protect them from attack. That’s what this piece of God’s wisdom is all about. And look at the priority it gives. Is it the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th order of business in our lives?

Above all else guard your heart…

No, it’s not down there at the bottom of the list. It’s up there at the top and there’s a very good reason for that. Because:

… it is the well spring of life.

If we have a diseased heart you’ll have a diseased life. Let that disease rule your life and you lose your life. There are so many people in this world with a diseased heart and a diseased heart robs us of life. Fear, anger, pride, arrogance, deceit, envy. They all live in the heart. They’re diseases and diseases that we need to deal with decisively.

Question is, how? I mean chronic disease is the sort of disease that’s been there for ages. It’s the hardest sort of disease to deal with. Almost impossible in fact. How do we deal with it?

We people are very much into surface things – things we can touch and feel.  Someone dresses well or performs well or looks good – and we judge them to be successful.  But God’s interested in something else.  Something quite different.  God’s interested in our hearts.

Sin (nasty little word , that) is a lot like heart disease – it ends up robbing us of life.  Anger, resentment, pride, dishonesty, lust – all those things, ultimately, rob you of life.  We may well want to sweep them under the carpet, but when you do that – all you get, is a lump under the carpet. 

They say men are the worst at going to the doctors. So many men drop dead in the prime of life from bowel cancer and heart disease. Because we just didn’t want to go to the doctors. There’s this foolish male pride thing going on. “Well, I’m a man. I’m strong. I’m okay.” And that’s the very same man who can wake up dead tomorrow because he didn’t go for a regular check up to the doctor.

In part it’s pride but in part it’s that we don’t want to hear the bad news. I mean how many men know that they’re overweight but they don’t want to hear it. They just ignore it and suppress it and behave like there’s nothing wrong. Until one day they have a stroke or a heart attack that could have been avoided with a bit of exercise, losing just a few pounds, getting the blood pressure under control. Hello!

We don’t want to hear the bad news and so, at best, we end up living a sub optimal unhealthy life where we’re tired and short of breath. And at worst we keel over dead before our time. Now, none of us likes bad news.

Problem is that our aversion to bad news can end up robbing us of life. We want to sweep it under the carpet but all you get when you sweep it under the carpet is a lump under the carpet. You actually don’t solve anything.

And so what we’re looking at this week and next week on the program is getting a grip and dealing with some issues. The things in our hearts that are robbing us of life.

And today, today if you’ll join me I’d like to have a bit of a health check with you. Just a bit of time where we look through the things going on in our hearts. A little probe, a little prod around in there. Because it’s not until we acknowledge those things that we can join hands with God and start doing something about them.

Now, we only have a few minutes so we’re going to talk about just a few diseases in our hearts today. The main ones. The ones that are ruining the lives of probably 80% of the people listening today, including you and me. Come on, let’s get real here. Let’s take some responsibility for the things that we’re hiding in our hearts.

Proverbs chapter 27, verse 19 says this:

As water reflects a face, so a mans heart reflects the man.

What’s going on on the inside is going to have an impact on the outside. You can’t help it. And so today we just want to look at a handful of these different diseases of the heart that are hurting our lives. And that’s why I’m asking you to spend these few minutes with me and have the courage, when you hear one or two that you know are alive in your heart, to look God directly in the eye and say, “God, you know something, that’s me! I have to take responsibility for that and even though I don’t have the strength or the ability to do something about it, I know that You have and You can and that You want to.”

This is about opening up our hearts to God and His Spirit and His Word to let Him to make some changes to heal our hearts. So that we can have the life that He always planned for us. Amen.

Okay, here’s the first one. Psalm 10, verse 3 says:

He boasts of the cravings of his heart. He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.

The first one. The first disease of the heart is greed. So many people in this world want more and more and more and more and more and we’re taught that that’s okay. Even our governments encourage us to spend more to help the economy. But when the cravings of our heart take over. When greed drives us. Let me tell you something, you and I will turn our hearts away from God. We will revile Him because we can’t serve Him and greed. We can’t serve Him and money and wealth and position and status.

And that one, this greed, leads to another disease. The disease of deception and dishonesty. Psalm 62, verse 10 says:

Do not trust in extortion or take pride in stolen goods. Though your riches increase do not set your heart on them.

Many, many people are caught up in deceit and dishonesty. In theft and lying. In fact there are certain personality types for whom this is their main weakness. And the problem with this is that you can’t lie straight in bed. You can’t be dishonest and deceitful and lie and cheat and then have a good nights sleep. Now you might be deceiving the rest of the world but none of us is stupid enough to think that we can deceive God.

And so, this particular disease of the heart robs us of our relationship and fellowship and intimacy with God. It’s a rotten disease and I know that there is someone who needs to look God in the eye and confess this sin right now and ask for forgiveness and ask for God to help heal their heart right now.

The third one, the third one’s a biggy. Many of us get caught up in this one and this is probably the main disease that God’s had to heal me of. Have a listen. Psalm 101, verse 5:

Whoever slanders his neighbour in secret, him will I put to silence. Whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, him I will not endure.

Interesting how slander and pride go together here. See the root’s in his pride. When I’m proud it’s all about me. I’m important. I’m more important than you and I’m more important than God and I’m right and it’s my way or the highway.

Now you see I can rattle those things off the tongue so quickly because I have more than a passing familiarity with those. And the thing that pride breeds in us is that we can’t stand it when someone else succeeds. We can’t stand it when someone else gets the limelight. And so the proud person will slander other people. They’ll stab them in the back. Undermine them.

And with pride and slander comes envy. Have a listen to this one. Proverbs chapter 14 and verse 30:

A heart of peace gives life to the body but envy rots the bones.

We looked at that one yesterday. You can’t have peace when you’re proud because life is about having one big competition. So pride, envy and slander are all part of the same disease and these next two follow close along. Have a listen to these from Daniel chapter 5, verse 20:

But when his heart became arrogant and hardened with pride, he was deposed from his royal throne and stripped of his glory.

This is written about King Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar’s son. He became arrogant and hard of heart. And that’s what happens through pride. And let me tell you something, God always opposes the proud. You can read that in James chapter 4 in verse 6.

And so this piece of wisdom from Solomon holds true. Proverbs 16, verse 18:

Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Now this last one we have time for, it’s a disease in the heart for many, both men and women. We’re reading about it in Proverbs chapter 6, verses 25 and 26. It says this:

Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes. For the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread and the adulteress preys upon your very life.

Lust, sexual lust brings many a man down. Tears many a marriage apart. It’s a real disease of the heart and this one, more than any other perhaps, is one that so many men and women quietly live with not realising the destruction that it brings upon them.

Now we’ve only spoken about a handful of most common diseases of the heart. Things that rob us. Greed. Dishonesty. Slander. Pride. Arrogance. Lust. These things harden our hearts to God. They rob us of life and that’s what we’re going to be looking at over these next few days and weeks. About the fact that God wants to come and heal us of these diseases.

Fifty years ago, heart transplants that actually kept people alive seemed to be an impossible dream.  Today, thousands of people have heart transplants every year.  They’re a reality.  And it turns out that God – well, God’s is in the heart transplant business too. In fact, He’s been in that business for a very long time.

I don’t know about you but I am old enough to remember the very first heart transplant. It was performed by Dr Christiaan Barnard on the 3rd of December, 1967. The patient was Mr Louis Washkansky. Sadly he lived for only 18 days and died, in the end, of pneumonia but his heart beat strongly until the end.

Since then, of course, there’s been many thousands of heart transplants and these days they are much more successful. The doctors have things pretty well figured out. They know how to stop the body rejecting the heart. I mean, for me, it’s impossible to imagine, how do they do that? Forty something years ago heart transplants were a pipe dream. Today, thousands are conducted each year around the world.

But here’s the thing, when the old heart is so diseased sometimes the only option, to bring life, is to implant a new heart. A heart that’s strong and healthy. A heart that will pump life to each of the hundred trillion or so cells in the human body for a good many years to come.

But this heart transplant idea, it’s not something new. Actually, it’s been around for thousands of years. Really!

This week on the program we’re looking at our hearts. No, not the fist sized muscle that beats between 2 and 3 billion times during the average lifetime. But our heart. Your heart. My heart. That deep place inside where we live. That place where we take things to heart. Where we lose heart. Where we long for something with all our heart.

When God talks about the heart, He’s talking about the inner being. The inner most part. The seat of our appetites, our emotions, our passions, our courage, our fear. The middle. The centre. The inner most part of the person.

And I remember when I first became aware of God. I mean really. A decade and a half ago when I decided to give my life to Jesus Christ. You know the amazing thing is, for all my life before then I thought I was fine. Yeah okay, I wasn’t perfect but I was pretty full of myself. You know, I thought I was pretty crash hot.

But then one day the Spirit of God came and touched me in a way that opened my heart. And one of the first things I realised was how rotten I was to the core. It wasn’t something I had to think a lot about. It wasn’t some guilt trip. I just knew when I gazed upon God for the first time I so deeply, so powerfully, for the first time really understood what He meant by that little word sin.

I was full of it and you know something, when we get a powerful revelation of God like that. When His Spirit reaches out and touches us with His truth like that, it’s a really common reaction. We’re gripped by our own inadequacy. And I think that’s important. Finally to realise that the clothes in which we once boasted were nothing but insubstantial rags.

It happened to the prophet Isaiah. Have a listen to what happens when he sees God down in the Temple in Jerusalem in the 8th century BC. Have a listen. Isaiah chapter 6 beginning at verse 1:

In the year that King Ussiah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty, and the hem of His robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above Him, each had six wings. With two they covered their faces and with two they covered their feet and with two they flew. And one called to another saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.”

The pivots on the threshold shook at the voices of those who called and the house was filled with smoke and I said, “Woe is me. I am lost for I am a man of unclean lips and I live amongst people of unclean lips. Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

Do you see the reaction? This reaction of a sinner who encounters the holy, pure, perfect, glorious God:

Woe is me. I am lost.

He recognises his own sinfulness in the presence of God. Now if this kind of God experience has never happened in your life. You might think, well, I’m getting a bit weird here. But for me, when I experienced the warmth and the love and the forgiveness and the glory and the power of God. It was in that place that I came to realise how diseased my heart truly was. How desperate my need truly was. I realised the poverty of my own spirit and my own situation and yet it was for me and for you that Jesus said:

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And I thought, “Well, now what? What do I do? How do I deal with this mess that I’m in?” That’s my natural reaction all the time. I’m a “doer” so I say, “Well what do I have to do?” Then one day I stumbled across these words in the Old Testament and they changed everything. Have a listen. This is God’s promise through the prophet Ezekiel and you can read it for yourself in Ezekiel chapter 36, verses 26 to 29. God says this:

A new heart I will give to you and a new Spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and make you follow My statutes and be careful to observe My ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors and you shall be My people and I will be your God. I will save you from all your uncleanness and I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you.

What an amazing promise. God promises them a heart transplant. That’s what God promises us. A new heart. Have a listen again:

I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you.

God’s Spirit within us and that’s what changes the way we live. See, there’s a flow on effect of this new Spirit and if you read that passage again it talks about God’s blessing:

Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors. You will be My people. I will be your God. I will save you from your uncleanness. I will summon the grain and make it abundant and lay no famine upon you.

See God offers us a new heart and a new spirit and from those things we change and the blessing flows.

Sometimes when a heart is so diseased we can operate on it as much as we like but nothing makes a difference. We need a new heart. Have you ever felt like Isaiah? Have you ever felt that sense that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be good enough for God?

Well, me too and I want to share a prayer with you. The prayer of King David after he had committed adultery and murder and he came to his senses before God. He felt so rotten. So dirty. So unclean. And so he cast himself on the mercy of God and this is what he prayed. You can read it in Psalm 51, verses 10 to 12. He prays:

Create in me a clean heart, oh God and put a new and right spirit in me. Do not cast me away from your presence. Do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Just when we think we have to do it all ourselves, what we discover is that actually God has a different plan. God plans to give us a new heart and a new spirit. Nothing that we do, something that God does. And you know something, that’s what I’ve discovered.

In one sense God changing me is still so much a work in progress but the closer I drew to God the more I discovered changed attitudes. A compassion I never had before. A desire to serve and not to be seen. A heart for people and a passion to serve God. I never had those things and somehow they just happened without me thinking too much about them.

God gave me a new heart, just like that!

When we’re exhausted – so tired we can’t go on, what we need to do is to stop and revive, in order to survive.  We need revival deep in our hearts.  And as things turn out – well, that’s God’s plan too. To revive an aching heart, and a failing spirit.

One of the things that happens just about everywhere on the planet I suspect is on those special holidays, those long weekends, school holidays, whatever, many people hop in their cars and head off for a break. Sometimes they drive long distances. I mean, here in Australia it’s a big country and it’s nothing for people to drive 11 or 12 or 13 hours straight to arrive at a holiday destination.

And of course, the longer you drive the more you become tired and the more your mind wanders and you lose concentration. And so tiredness combined with the fact there are many more people on the roads, leads to a spike in road accidents and fatalities.

In the state where I live, a few years ago, the police or the road authority or whoever it was, came up with a catchy slogan and it goes like this. “Stop. Revive. Survive.” It’s not bad and it’s true. Sometimes we have to stop and revive in order to survive. And you know, it’s like that in life sometimes too.

Have you ever been exhausted to the core? You know, so dog tired that you feel as though that you can’t possibly go on. There are a lot of reasons that can happen but happen it does and when it does we need something or someone to revive us. Fortunately, God has a plan.

We’ve been talking this week on the program about our hearts. You know that place deep down inside where we live. That place where we experience joy and pain. Peace and turmoil. Deep down in our hearts. And in this world, time and time again, you see people who are so exhausted, so wrung out.

Interesting, I was listening to a social commentator being interviewed on the radio just the other day. And he was making the point that we’re in a phase, in western society at least, where it’s all about perfection. The perfect latte. The perfect holiday. The perfect meal. The perfect education for our children. This striving for perfection all the time is making people tired. It’s exhausting.

Because when you go to the coffee shop and the coffee isn’t quite perfect and the service isn’t quite perfect people are starting to get all stressed as though somehow their lives were meant to be perfect. And they were never meant to be perfect.

That started me thinking and I thought about it for a while and I came to the conclusion that actually sin is exhausting. You know, selfishness and pride and anger. Whatever it is in our lives, all those things take so much energy.

I mean rebelling against God is just plain hard work. Because when we do that we’re living in a manner that we weren’t designed to live in. We’re pulling in the opposite direction to God and we know that it just doesn’t work. It’s exhausting. You start feeling like you’re carrying around these incredible loads and burdens.

As I look back on my life, I used to be so concerned about my image. What people thought about me. I was always trying to impress people. Like you’re living life for show. Always in the limelight. I was addicted to that stuff. It was just plain exhausting.

It was like living in a display home all the time. You know when you’re selling the house, you always keep it perfectly neat and tidy just in case the agent brings some prospective buyer around at a moments notice. You never relax. You never enjoy. You’re always on edge.

Listen to me! Millions of people are living their lives like that and it’s not the way it’s meant to be. Some people out there, well you need to stop and revive in order to survive.

Have a listen to this. It comes from God. It comes from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Have a listen, it’s great stuff. Isaiah chapter 57, verses 15 to 21:

For thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy. He says, “I dwell in the high and holy place and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite.

For I will not continuously accuse nor will I always be angry for then the spirits would grow faint before me, even the souls that I have made. Because of their wicked covetness I was angry. I struck them, I hid, I was angry but they kept turning back to their own ways. I have seen their ways but I will heal them. I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips.

‘Peace, peace to the far and near’, says the Lord, ‘I will heal them. But the wicked, they are like the tossing sea. They cannot keep still. It’s waters toss up mire and mud. There is no peace,’ Says my God, for the wicked.’

See the story playing itself out here? God wants to revive our spirit. He wants to revive our hearts. Now I’m sure you know this but this was written originally in the Hebrew language. So this word “revive”, well I went back to see what it originally meant before it was translated into the English.

Here’s what the dictionary definition for the original word is. “To live. Have life. Remain alive. Sustain life. Live prosperously. Live forever. Be quickened. Be alive. Be restored to life or health.”

“Wow, give me some of that”, says the one who’s exhausted. But we have to read the rest of what God’s saying here through the prophet Isaiah. See it talks about God’s anger towards the wicked and then it talks about His mercy and grace. Let’s have a look at it again, Isaiah 57, verses 18 and 19:

I have seen their ways but I will heal them. I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace to the far and the near, says the Lord, and I will heal them.

See this promised revival of the heart and the spirit is not for everyone. God says:

I dwell in the high and holy place.

And also:

With those who are contrite and humble in spirit. In order to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite.

This peace, this revival, this rest is for the humble and the contrite. But those who continue rebelling against God, this is what they should expect:

The wicked are like the tossing sea. They cannot keep still. It’s waters toss up the mire and mud. There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.

God is saying something here. He wants to heal our hearts. He wants to revive the heart. Revive the spirit. But He’s giving us the choice and the choice is ours. It’s yours and it’s mine. If we set our hearts on living the life that God always intended.

If we bow our lives down before Him. If we humble ourselves. If we come to Him with contrition. If we decide to live a life that’s close to Him and in Him, a life that honours Him as our God. If we turn from the sin. Let me call it exactly what it is, sin, that’s like a heavy weight on our shoulders, here’s what to expect from God. Revival of the spirit and revival of the heart.

But if we don’t humble ourselves before God. If we don’t turn back to Him, then expect this. There is no peace or no rest for the wicked. They are God’s words and not mine. Let me come back to it.

If you are someone whose heart is to honour God and to serve Him, I want to encourage you to take God at His word today. Expect Him to revive your heart. Expect Him to give you peace and rest on every side including on the inside. Because actually, that’s exactly what God wants to do for you and for me and anyone else who is humble and contrite, bowing their lives down to God.

It’s that simple, really.