A Healthy Heart Series

A Healthy Heart

(Sound file of heart beat)

Your heart, do you ever stop and think about your heart? It’s pretty important. One of the pivotal points when you are expecting is when you can first hear your child’s heartbeat. And in all the murder and mayhem shows on TV what’s the first thing they do when they discover a body? Sure, check to see if there is a pulse, a heartbeat. Except on Bones, because then it’s pretty evident that the person is dead.

And so for many people life begins and ends with their heart. Hardly much bigger than your fist your heart will beat 60 times a minute, 3600 times an hour, 86,400 times a day. And that’s just one day, if you live to be 70 then your heart will have beat 25,550 days, do the math. Every minute of our lives the heart pumps over five litres of blood through our bodies, that's over 300 litres of blood an hour, 7,200 litres of blood a day through a network of 96,000 km of arteries, veins and capillaries. And again that is just one day.

But if we move away from the physical it was B.C. Forbes who said “The size of your body is of little account; the size of your brain is of much account; the size of your heart is of the most account of all.” And that has nothing to do with the physical size of your heart. When you love someone you love them with all your heart and when they leave they broke your heart. If someone is kind compassionate and loving they have a big heart on the other hand if they are none of those they are heartless.

If you really enjoy the Big Apple you “Heart NY”.

Six verses into the bible when God looked at the world and how it had deviated from his will and his way we read in Genesis 6:5 The LORD observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil.

And then the very next verse tells us the result, Genesis 6:6 So the LORD was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.

This is week four of our health check series and this morning we are looking at “A Healthy Heart.” And this is important. The leading cause of hospitalization in Canada continues to be heart disease and stroke, accounting for 16.9 % of total hospitalizations. Heart disease and stroke costs the Canadian economy more than $22.2 billion every year in physician services, hospital costs, lost wages and decreased productivity. That’s 22.2 Billion with a B.

And Heart disease is the number one killer in Canada, approximately 30% of Canadians who die this year will die from a heart related condition. Every seven minutes someone will die from heart disease or stroke in Canada. From the time our first service began at 9:00 a.m. until our third service will finish at 3:15 this afternoon statically speaking heart disease will have killed over 40 people in Canada.

And there are some frightening statistics that point to the cause of Heart disease, I read this just recently.

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Canadians or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than Canadians or Americans.

The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Canadians or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than Canadians or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Canadians or Americans.

So apparently it is speaking English that will kill you!!!

But the reality is that regardless of what language we speak most of us start with a healthy heart. Oh there are a few anomalies and sometimes you will hear of a child who has been born with a heart problem but for the most part we start with a healthy heart that will do what very few if any man made pumps could do and that is pump continually for up to a hundred years or beyond without having parts replaced.

So how does that relate to us individually as Christ Followers and collectively as his church? Well, the bible, the word of God uses the word heart hundreds of times from the first time it is mentioned in the book of Genesis until the last time it is mentioned in the book of Revelation. And very few of those instances refer to the organ that beats in your chest. Instead it refers to our love, our loyalty and our attitudes, both toward God and toward others.