This week my wife and I
were overjoyed to welcome our third child into the family. The Lord has given
us a beautiful baby girl who instantly melted our hearts. As the nurses ran
tests on her they discovered a minor problem—her oxygen levels were below
normal. The pediatrician ordered a deeper investigation with an electrocardiogram
(EKG). The scan revealed that our little Lydia was born with a heart defect.
The cardiologist informed
us that she was born with a small hole in her heart, which she termed an atrial
septal defect (ASD). Apparently, these can be common problems in infants. The
doctor said they were confident that it was small enough that with time the
heart would heal, and the hole would close itself. “However,” said the doctor, “if
that doesn’t happen, there is a corrective surgery we can do to close the hole
and fix the heart.”
We breathed a sigh of
relief upon hearing that news, packed up our things and left the hospital grateful
for another blessing. While reflecting on that episode I began to think about
the spiritual connections. The Bible says that everyone of us is born with a defective
heart, (spiritually speaking that is). In the Bible the heart represents man’s
innermost being—the seat of our consciousness, will and nature.
“Behold, I was brought
forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me,” David wrote in Psalm
51:5. The prophet Jeremiah lamented, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately sick; who can understand it? (17:9)” And, Jesus, diagnosed our
problem, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual
immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person
(Matt. 15:19-20).”
The heart of the problem
is a problem of the heart. We spend most of our lives trying to fill the hole
in heart with different things—money, success, popularity, pleasure. As the
famous French mathematician and scientist Blaise Pascal realized, “There is a
God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any
created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.”
The Preacher of Ecclesiastes
mused that this “existential void” should point us to God, “He [God] has put
eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done
from the beginning to the end (3:11).” To put it another way, we all have an “itch”
for eternal things, that no finite thing can “scratch.”
If you are seeking
fulfillment, purpose, or meaning from this world, I have some bad news: you
will never find it. There is nothing in the world that will fill the deepest
void in your life. Only God is big enough for that. The Good News of the Gospel
is that we have a Great Physician who can not only fix your broken heart, but
He can fill it with His—love, joy, peace and the most valuable things that can’t
be found in this world.
We stand in need of spiritual
surgery. Have you submitted to the scalpel of Christ? “And I will give you a
new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart
of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ex. 36:26). -DM
No comments:
Post a Comment