Extreme Makeover - Heart Edition

By: Carl Holland
Carl's Words of Inspiration

Heart transplant surgery, though still a very serious operation, seems almost routine with today's medical technology. Many people claim to feel like they have much more energy and can breathe better after receiving a new heart. Sort of a "renewed life" you might say. That's what it's like when we come to God and let the Holy Spirit work inside us. Before a heart transplant is even considered, it must be determined that there is a problem with the heart to begin with. You may be physically healthy without a heart disease, but you still have to contend with "heart deceive." In Jeremiah 17:9 we read:

The heart is deceitful above all things,

And desperately wicked;

who can know it?

And in Proverbs 28:26:

He who trusts in his own heart is a fool,

But whoever walks wisely will be delivered.

So, our own hearts can deceive us and we not know it, and we are fools to trust it. Ouch! Sounds pretty harsh, but that’s what God says about our emotional heart. He certainly knows, and He says so in Jeremiah 17:10:

I, the LORD, search the heart,

I test the mind,

Even to give every man according to his ways,

According to the fruit of his doings.

So how do we get this extreme heart makeover? Simple… we just ask the Master Surgeon for it, and we humbly allow Him to do it. As we seek to do His will and set our own desires aside, He renews our heart, both inwardly in how we look at things such as ourselves and situations we face, and outwardly in how we respond to and treat others around us. Is your heart made of stone, and maybe you don't even realize it? Have you stopped to honestly consider whether your own heart is deceiving you and you're operating based on feelings rather than God's Spirit within you? Humbly submit to His authority, His ways, and His will for you today, setting your sights on the things above, and let Him do some radical, life-changing heart surgery in you to make you more like Him! Jesus is the cure for any heart condition!

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height- to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

- Ephesians 3:14-19

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you;

I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh

and give you a heart of flesh.

-Ezekiel 36:26