Check-ups

It’s not something I love to do, but several times a year I have check-ups.  I have an annual eye exam. I sit in the dark with one eye covered and strain read “O, F…No, make that E! G, H, I…errr, um, no that’s a T.” Yeah, it’s fun.    I have my teeth cleaned and examined twice a year. I sit and review my memory passages in between counting the tiles on the ceiling to get my mind off of the scraping going on inside my mouth.  “Are your teeth always sensitive?” the hygienist asked the last time I was there.  “No.  Only when someone is taking a jack hammer to the back of them,” I wanted to answer!  I also have a yearly over-all physical examination.  Enough said!  Though they’re less than fun, without those examinations blindness could be lurking around the corner.  Decay could take over a tooth.  Minor problems that could lead to deadly disease would go unchecked.  It’s essential to good health to have regular examinations. 

Spiritually it’s just as important that we have regular check ups.  It’s so easy for bitterness to cause decay in our heart.  Resentment and envy are cancers that destroy usefulness. Stop and ask the Lord: How’s my heart today? Am I blind to something I should be seeing?   Is my heart:

• tender
• sensitive
• thankful
• grateful

or is it:

• hard
• unresponsive
• self-centered
• resentful

Yesterday I read Hebrews 3:7-10 To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works forty years. Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.  The Lord brought to my mind that if I do not acknowledge what He is doing in my life, my heart could become hardened.  If I don’t recognize God’s hand in what is going on around me, that means I take credit for it all.  How arrogant that is. 

We must all realize that everything that goes on in a day is from the hand of our God.  When we fail to recognize that, we are like the Israelites who didn’t know God’s ways.  This is just one small way that a hard heart can slip in.  A hardening of our heart leads us away from the Lord.  We are independent of Him and are on our own.  How disastrous that is!  Look where it got the Israelites! 

At the first realization of a hard heart, we must apply the cure, just like we would if there was a physical issue going on.  The cure is confession and acknowledging our God.  “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.”  Learn to thank Him for the little things all day long.  Recognize what He is doing and tell others.  Your security in Christ, answered prayer, provision of needs, grace blessings…they’re all His doing.  Have you thanked Him today? 

Don’t let your heart get hard.  Get it checked, then at first sign of disease, take the remedy!