Archive for the ‘Everyone Should Have a Heart Attack’ Category

Ok, so most of you know that this past week I had a little bit of a heart issue and was in the hospital for a few days.   When things like this happen to me, I often find that it’s God’s way of slowing me down and I know I need to listen.  It also gave me some incredible prayer time.  What I heard from God was the question, “How healthy is your heart, Gary?”.  The question was not meant in a physical way, but in a spiritual way.  Althought I was in the hospital to have tests done on the muscle inside my chest that pumps blood throughout my body, God questioned my heart.  So, I felt led to speak to the youth about this, and here are some of my thoughts on what we learned this past Sunday. 

The lesson this week was on the condition of our heart.  We took a look at Matthew 13:1-9, the parable of the sower.  This parable, being the first parable that Jesus taught, tells of the condition of the heart in regards to God’s word.  Jesus isn’t teaching about this muscle in our chest, but rather about the combination of our feelings and our mind.  The heart is mentioned many times in the bible and it’s rarely talking about an organ, but rather this combination of thoughts and ideas, feelings and emotions and come together and form someone’s heart.  Pharoh’s heart was hardened after the hebrews left Egypt, but he didn’t have a heart attack, that meant that his thoughts, emotions, feelings were all stone cold, hard, unmoving.

So in this parable, we discover that there are four types of hearts.  The first is the kind of heart that hard.  As the seeds were thrown they hit the path, or a well traveled place.  The dirt was packed by carts, animals, people walking on it.  Such is some people hearts that are hardened and refuse to let anything in.  Do you know someone like that?  Someone who is hard to communicate with, someone who’s hard of hearing?  So when the Word comes to them, Satan snatches it away, much like the birds taking the seed from the path.  The second heart is the shallow heart.  I find myself having this issue all too often.  I ask someone how there day is going, only to expect a quick answer of “fine” back so that I can keep walking.  Jesus says that the shallow heart will allow things to grow only a little so that the roots are not enough to withstand pain or heartache.  Just like the sun scorches the plants that have weak roots, we tend to lose things from our heart that we don’t invest in and truly give good root.  The third heart is the cluttered heart.  Again, this is one of the convictions I received myself as I studied and taught this less.  This heart is one that has no room for things.  People put so much into their lives, they count on so much, they rely on so many things that sometimes, it’s hard to let God in to give His provision.  We clutter our lives with ipods, and cell phones, and tv, and xboxes and the list goes on, but how much time do we devote to letting God into our hearts?  The bible says in Matthew 6:21 that “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”.  Do you treasure Jesus Christ?   Lastly, the good heart.  This is a fertile, good ground that would take the seed and let it grow, let it flourish and produce fruits beyond measure. 

I believe that we all have seasons of good hearts.  Just as a farmer needs to plow his soil to make it good for the seed, so too do we need to plow our hearts every so often to have good fertile ground for Christ to work within us, producing crops that will last forever.

Gary