NINETY PERCENT OF HEART BY-PASS PATIENTS do not make any drastic lifestyle changes lasting more than two years, even though those changes could decrease chest pain, improve quality of life, and most importantly keep them from having another heart surgery.
Why is it so difficult to make lasting changes that would so greatly influence your life in a positive way? It’s not because we don’t have the facts about how and why we need to change, it’s because we don’t have the feelings. That is the need has not really struck our heart.
Recent research has shown that having the facts is not enough. Just take the looming gasoline crisis in the United States. We have seen the charts declaring that if we continue down the road we are on we will run out of “easy” resources by the middle of this century and yet Detroit continues to make large gas guzzling cars because we continue to buy them. Yes, we say that were concerned, but we have yet to get emotional about it. We know the facts, but in many ways, we just don’t care.
How we feel about our automobiles and our arteries is often the way we feel about our spiritual life. We know that we should pray more, read the Bible more, tell more people about Jesus, and sin less; heaven knows we all head it enough from the preacher. However, we seem powerless to do anything about it. I guess we could say, “Our heart’s just not in it.” So, how do we bring about a change of heart?
Again, recent findings may help us out. We have often been taught, and believed, that small, incremental changes will be easier to make and sustain. But what is now being discovered is that it is often the radical, sweeping changes that are often the easiest because they often yield the quickest benefits. If this is true, then rather than changing our prayer lives by making room for five minutes a day for prayer, it would be better to carve out an entire hour. Now, that’s radical! Yet, I am sure that the changes that hour would yield would radically change our lives by pumping new spiritual power into our spiritual hearts.
Come on, put your heart into and give it a try.