Heart Failure

The human heart is a phenomenal mechanism! We are shocked when someone young and athletic has heart failure. But I am amazed that it doesn’t happen more often to more people. How does this little organ keep going when so much is demanded of it?

By the end of the day, your heart (the body’s engine room) will have beaten around 100,000 times (around 60 to 80 beats per minute). This will pump around 1.5 gallons (around 6.8 liters) of blood per minute through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels that are in the human body, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

That’s the incredible physical heart. But what about our spiritual heart? Our inner core being? This amazing part of us can keep going or cave under all the pressures of life. That doesn’t mean all doom and disaster, though. There’s no need to fear. We can say with the psalmist, “My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26).

The apostle Paul knew a lot about stress, both physical and spiritual. He set an example for us when he said, “We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself…Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day” (II Corinthians 4:14 & 16). He also uses the phrase “we do not lose heart” in verse 1 of the same chapter. Doesn’t that mean we don’t need to have heart failure?

I love verses 8 & 9 in this chapter, too, where Paul says, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” Why? Because of the verses that follow (in the paragraph above). Christ’s death and resurrection secure for us the possibility of a continuously healthy spiritual heart.

What are you facing today? Are you on the verge of heart failure? Or are you claiming the victory won through our Lord?