How Heart-Healthy Are You?

"This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me" (Matthew 15:8)

I have recently become much better acquainted with the term "heart-healthy," beloved! Believe me, since my recent experience with a stent implant, I have been doing my best to be "heart-healthy" in my lifestyle. Bev has become quite an authority on what we should eat and what we should not. And you simply won't find much of what we were eating in our house anymore. For years I was guilty of paying "lip service" to the notion of being heart-healthy, but there really wasn't much substance behind that claim.

Jesus had the same problem with the religious leaders of His day, except that their failure to be "heart-healthy" occurred on a much deeper and more consequential level! When the scribes and Pharisees chided His disciples for not observing the man-made tradition of ceremonial religious cleansing before eating, Jesus let them know in no uncertain terms that their own claim to spiritual superiority was just so much "lip service" (Matthew 15:3-6). Then in the verse before us here, He flat out accused them of fulfilling Isaiah's prophecy by being anything but "heart-healthy" spiritually!

How many of us who are professed followers of Jesus Christ are as "heart-healthy" as we ought to be in our personal relationship with Him? In our visible walk before this watching unsaved world? Jesus made it clear by quoting Isaiah's words that there is nothing at all wrong with honoring Him with our lips. In fact, Scripture teaches us that it is "the fruit of (our) lips" that is pleasing to God as we give thanks to His name (Hebrews 13:15). When we worship Him in spirit and in truth, we do "honor" Him with our lips! But it is only when our hearts are not in tune with our lips that we become shallow and hypocritical and prove that we are not "heart-healthy" at all. If it is foolish to pay lip service to taking care of our physical health while in reality abusing it with wrongful living, beloved, imagine how much more foolish it is for us to "play" at true spirituality, claiming with our lips to be committed Christians while in reality something or someone else has stolen our heart away.

How "heart-healthy" are you today? Have you made that commitment by faith to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord? Does the Holy Spirit have complete control of your life so that He can mold you into that kind of Christian that truly does back up his lip service with his living? I encourage you to become a "heart-healthy" person today in all respects, beloved, but especially through a genuine personal relationship with Jesus Christ!

Ron