THE PROBLEM OF THE HEART

THE PROBLEM OF THE HEART

The Book of Proverbs declares, “Above all else, guard your heart for it is the well spring of life.” (Proverbs 4:23)

This wise saying is as true in the physical sense as in the spiritual. The heart is the core of a person’s life. The heart pumps blood throughout the body through the circulatory system, supplying oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and removing carbon dioxide and other wastes. Proverbs aptly describes the heart as the well spring of life. 

The heart is also the center of those qualities which make us human. Scripture also speaks of the heart in metaphor. The heart bears many layers of meaning. The heart may be known as the center of all relationships,  intellectual or emotional. God’s word describes God speaking to our hearts. The Bible tells us how God has a heart for us before we ever had a heart for Him.

All four Gospels assert that Jesus knew people’s hearts.

On one occasion when he healed a lame man, He asked the religious leaders, “Why do you question in your hearts?” (Luke 5:22).

When the disciples argued among themselves as who among them should be the greatest in His Kingdom, “Jesus saw the thoughts of their hearts, took  a child and placed him in the midst saying, ‘Whoever is least among you is great.’ (Luke 9:47)

In talking to the woman who had had five husbands, Jesus revealed that He knows all about her.

Seated at the last supper Jesus knew what would happen- Judas would betray Him.

The disciples were stunningly awed by the Lord’s omniscience that they confessed, “Now we know that you know all things(including the thoughts and contents of their heart) and need none to question you; by this we believe that you came from God.”(John 16:30)

It was the public exposure of people’s evil heart that caused public hatred of Jesus as He condemned the hypocrisy of the Jewish clergy. Later, the Apostle Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, described the Lord Jesus Christ as having the power to “to bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts”. (1 Cor. 4:5)

Our Lord knows our stories and is acquainted with our weaknesses. He knows the corruption of the human heart because of sin, and He freely accepted the judgment of condemnation and the just penalty for  our sins by dying in our place.

In 1948 when the world was recoiling from the realization that man had succeeded in splitting the atom, which paved the way for the invention of the Atomic bomb, Albert Einstein, the genius behind this scientific breakthrough was quoted as saying that the problem lies in the hearts and thoughts of men. He said what terrifies is not the explosive force of the atomic bomb, but the wickedness of the human heart- its explosive power of evil.

The Bible says, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and desperately wicked, who can understand it?”(Jeremiah 17:9). But it also tells us that God will give us a new heart and put a new spirit in us; he will remove our stony stubborn heart and give us a tender responsive heart. (Ezekiel 36:26)  Christ penetrated the darkest places of our hearts, and changed our sinful, deceitful hearts.

Man has a spiritual nature. He is essentially a spiritual being, more than flesh and bones. The Bible says it is our spiritual nature that sets us apart from lower forms of life. St. Augustine in the 4^th century remarkably observed that man’s heart is restless until it finds rest in God.

The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal described the God shaped  vacuum in the heart of every man which only Christ can fill.  

Scripture makes it clear that man’s heart was afflicted by sin, and because of sin man died. The wages of sin is death. (Romans 6:23)

The good News however is that new life is possible in Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:1-10). 

The mark of a true Christian is to experience the transforming power of Christ in his heart.  

All of us are sick in the heart. But God has provided a cure. Sin is the curse, Christ is the cure. Christ gives a new heart and a new spirit. The message of the Gospel of Christ gives us this simple truth. If you have not received Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord of your life, your heart will find no rest. You will have that emptiness or vacuum in your heart, which only Christ could fill the void. The hope of a Christian is Christ. 

The Word of God says, “If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and it is with your mouth that you confessed and are saved.” (Romans 10:9-10)

Among the essential subjects of the Christian faith are sin and salvation. The disease and the cure. Sin in man. Salvation in Christ. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains in him.” (John 3:36).  

All of us are sinners. We are  spiritually sick at the heart. The Psalmist David acknowledged the hard universal truth when he said, “For I was born  a sinner, yes, from the moment my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5) So David asked God to create in him a clean heart. (Psalm 51:10)

The Lord Jesus Christ made it very clear that those who are well have no need of a physician. And who could claim that everything is perfectly and absolutely well with him or her?

God’s word declares, “If you say you have no sin you deceive yourself and the truth is not in you. (1 John 1:8) The Lord Jesus Christ said, “I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. (Mark 2:17). And the Bible says, “There is no one righteous, no, not even one”. (Romans 3:10-12)

Jesus is the Healer. He is the cure and that is the good news.  But He tells us the bad news first. The bad news is we are sick at heart. The bad news is some, do not believe or are not even aware  they have a bad, sinful heart. God’s word says, “If you say you have no sin you deceive yourself”.

So we need to hear and listen to the weeping prophets. We need to be told that we are not good  and our good is not good enough. We need to be told that we are sinners in need of a Savior and if we die without Christ we will face judgment, for it is appointed unto man once to die but after this the judgment. (Hebrews 9:27) This is the judgment of eternal separation from God and suffering in hell. We need to be told that the wages of sin is death. We need to be told to repent of our sins. We need to be warned that Christ will come again no longer as Savior but to judge everyone. We need to be warned that hell is real.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved-you and your household.” (Acts 16:31)

THE MESSAGE OF THE CROSS

Every year the Christian world celebrates the Lent. It is a solemn religious observance, in the liturgical calendar of many Christian denominations  which begins on Ash Wednesday, and covers a period of six weeks culminating on Easter Sunday. The Roman Catholic Church, the Reformed, the Lutheran Church, the Anglicans, the Methodists and  some evangelical churches observe the Lenten season as a long held tradition. It has been so ingrained as a religious tradition, that the ritualism has overshadowed the real meaning and significance of Lent, in the Biblical sense. 

The Message of the Cross, is the heart of the celebration of the Holy Week. The Message of the Cross of Christ is to most of us an old Message in the sense that the tradition is repeated year after year, but no matter how old it is, it remains a life transforming message.

As Christians perhaps we need to revisit the message of the cross of Christ with a fresh new look, and imagine ourselves standing on that hill, where our savior died that dark Friday. 

The Message of the Gospel of Christ could be found there and we need not look elsewhere.

My friends as we gaze at the forlorn figure of the Christ on the cross it is my hope that you too will embrace Him as Lord and Savior.

The great Saint and Apostle Paul of Tarsus, spoke  succinctly of the Gospel message, which the whole Christendom is observing today. 

He said,  “Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1–4).

The message of the cross of Christ is clear and simple. There is no need for us to go into theological or philosophical studies to grasp it.

St. Paul said there are three important things which we need to think in the gospel message. 

First, the Man on the cross “died for our sins.” We are all sinners. As Romans 3:23 tells us, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

When we speak of sin there is no difference! No difference between the corporate lawyer, the drug dealer, the rapist, or the judge. No difference between a rich politician, a bank robber, or refined graduate of the Ateneo. And no difference between a gangster or an upright member of Rotary or Sto. Nino Parish.  

Apart from the grace of God poured forth at the cross, we would all be going to hell.

The reality of sin needs to be acknowledged by all who approach the throne of God for salvation. A sinner must acknowledge the hopelessness of his guilt before God in order for forgiveness to take place, and he must understand that the “wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Without this foundational truth, no gospel presentation is complete.

Second, the person and work of Christ are indispensable components of the gospel. Jesus is both God (Colossians 2:9) and man (John 1:14). Jesus lived the sinless life that we could never live (1 Peter 2:22), and, because of that, He is the only one who could die a substitutionary death for the sinner. Sin against an infinite God requires an infinite sacrifice. Therefore, either man, who is finite, must pay the penalty for an infinite length of time in hell, or the infinite Christ must pay for it once. Jesus went to the cross to pay the debt we owe to God for our sin, and those who are covered by His sacrifice will inherit the kingdom of God as sons of the king (John 1:12).

Third, the resurrection of Christ is an essential element of the gospel. The resurrection is the proof of the power of God. Only He who created life can resurrect it after death, only He can reverse the hideousness that is death itself, and only He can remove the sting that is death and the victory that is the grave’s (1 Corinthians 15:54–55).

And finally my friends, please ponder on this: Unlike all other religions, Christianity alone possesses a Founder who transcends death and who promises that His followers will do the same. All other religions were founded by men and prophets whose end was the grave.

The  Christ  who died on that cross whom we venerate Lent after Lent offers His salvation as a free gift (Romans 5:15; 6:23), that can only be received by faith, apart from any works or merit on our part (Ephesians 2:8–9).

As the apostle Paul tells us, the gospel is “the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Romans 1:16). The same inspired author tells us, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

God Bless all of you my dear friends.

THE WIDE BELIEVING EYES OF A CHILD

THE WIDE BELIEVING EYES OF A CHILD

My friend an intellectual and academic, asks me why I profess to be a Christian, knowing that we used to be rabid skeptics during our college days. I gave him a straight, simple answer.

I told him my conversion was providential. One day I said to myself if I were to remain a skeptic, then I had to be honest in my skepticism. So I got down to read Christianity’s Scripture, not with a critical mind, but to know really what it has to say to me. So I came to the saving grace of Christ, not as a learned man, of which I could not perfectly say I am, but as a child.

The most amazing message that Jesus said, struck me, cutting me down to size. The Savior said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." (Mark 10:15)

Then He continued to say, "I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.”(Matthew 18:3). “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 18:4)

I realized I am a sinner, no doubt about it. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). The best things I will ever attain, or hope to attain, or the best of whatever good I will do or hope to do, cannot impress the Living God, who created everything and  before whom all of us, at the appointed time will stand.

And this is where I part company with some of my friends, who believe that as long as they live good upright and moral lives, as long as their good deeds outweigh the bad, they are right with God.

The problem is no one is good enough. I believe that while there is some innate goodness in man, Scripture declares that man has fallen into sin, and this sin nature, separated him from God. The Bible declares that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.(Romans 3:23) For there is  no one  righteous, not even one.(Romans 3:10).

Even the best of us and the most upright of men cannot stand before the awesome presence of the Almighty God and claim that he deserves to enter God’s Kingdom, or deserves God’s favor, solely upon his own personal merit.  I also realized I cannot approach God on my own terms. Having rejected God at some point in my life,  did not give me any real peace, or joy, at all, but restlessness and turmoil, for I was looking for Him in the wrong places.

I came to the point of understanding that man’s salvation is by grace through faith, not of himself, it is a gift of God, and not of man’s works, so that no one can boast. The gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord (Romans 6:23).

This conviction led me to embrace the Christ, of the Christians. For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit. (1 Peter 3:18). This is the living hope of all Christians. Hope that if they die in Christ, they too will live with Him.

Conversion is becoming like a child. Children do not put on airs of pride and arrogance. They do not desire power or authority, they do not make harsh judgments, are free from malice, teachable, trusting, utterly dependent, and weak. A childlike faith is simple, simple enough to understand.

In their book, Wrestling Prayer, Christian authors Eric and Leslie Ludy, aptly said, “So, if you are an intellectual who thinks himself smarter than the Word of God, I hope my unwavering confidence in the Bible doesn't prove a stumbling block but rather an inspiration as you keep reading. For what we are about to enter into is sacred territory that can be apprehended only through the wide, believing eyes of a little child. This divine terrain holds untold blessings in its bosom; however, those blessings will be gleaned only by those who rise up and claim them with the unabashed faith of a five-year-old.”

God Bless you my friend.