A New Heart // God Wants to Heal Your Heart, Part 4

Sixty years ago, heart transplants were 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 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”